Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her drawing-room had been untenanted.  And in the meantime no one knows what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon the shore for a word of farewell.  But, indeed, if it were not for the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would become very tame affairs.  When the first man and maid said even the most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion.  Very likely the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.  Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it.  And, enchantment being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and Olivia was taking her tea.  Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness.  But it must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore were “les antipodes des graces.”  She was followed by a footman, his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea.  Mrs. Hastings had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug.  She sat down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another sort of energy and became fragments of talk.  Mrs. Hastings was like the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.

“Good morning, Mr. St. George,” she said.  “I’m sure I’ve quite forgotten everything.  Olivia dear, I’ve had all the prescriptions made up that I’ve ever taken to Rutledge’s, because no one can tell what the climate will be like, it’s so low on the map.  I’ve looked up the Azores—­that’s where we get some of our choicest cheese.  And camphor—­I’ve got a pound of camphor.  And I must say positively that I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound.  And then the flaxseed, Olivia dear.  I’ve got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell—­”