“There’s an air about this one though, sir,” opined Rollo firmly, “there’s a cut—­a sort of way with the seams, so to speak, sir, that the other can’t touch.  And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts every time.”

“Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo,” said St. George, “and as a judge of ‘cut’ I don’t say you can be equaled.  But I do say that in the styles of Deuteronomy you aren’t necessarily what you might call up.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rollo, dropping his eyes, “but a well-dressed man was a well-dressed man, sir, then as now.”

As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked uncommonly well in the garments a la mode in Yaque.  One would have said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.  The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest stageland because the colours were so good.

“I dare say,” said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth whose shades were of curious depth and richness, “that this may be regular Tyrian purple.”

Amory waved his long sleeves.

“Stop,” he languidly begged, “you make me feel like a golden text.”

St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge threatening bulk of Mount Khalak.  Since the prince’s announcement that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that walk.  Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he accused it.

“Amory,” he burst out as he walked, “if you didn’t know anything about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her consent to marry him?”

Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of Chillingworth’s desk of a bright, American morning.

“If I didn’t know anything about it,” he said cheerfully, “I should say that he had.  As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is more unlikely.  And that’s about as strong as you could put it.”

“We don’t know what the man may have threatened,” said St. George morosely, “he may have played upon her devotion to her father to some ridiculous extent.  He may have refused to land the submarine at Yaque at all otherwise—­”

St. George broke off suddenly.

“Toby!” he said.

Amory looked over and nodded.  He had seen that look before on St. George’s face.

“She’s not going to marry the prince,” said St. George, “and if her father is alive and in a hole, he’s going to be pulled out.  And she’s not going to marry the prince.”

“Why, no,” assented Amory, “no.”