To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of purple and black.  He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs. Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to receive—­and a member of the High Council bent to hand—­two glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.  There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced.  If the island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.  Personality meant nothing to her—­not, as with them, because it had been merged in something greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self.  And there sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his knees.  In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant implication of things imponderable, the personality of each persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.  Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George smiled a shade bitterly.  Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?  Is love’s uttermost gift so little?  But as the music swelled with premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very transitoriness disclosed:  the persistence of love, love’s mere immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.

Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof.  Then a veil hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince’s train appeared.  There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post.  Last came Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George remembered.  His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him an air of almost unearthly distinction.  His delicate hands wearing no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.  He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without preface began to speak.