With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.  Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory was prepared to speed well the interview with “the little brown ’un” who, he supposed, was Jarvo.

It was Jarvo—­Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and incredible.  The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated.  He sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment and approached Amory almost without greeting.

“Adon, adon,” he said earnestly, “you must leave the palace at once—­at once.  But to-night!”

Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm of his hand.

“To-night,” he repeated, as if it were a game.

“Ah well, now,” said Amory reasonably, “why, Jarvo?  And we so comfortable.”

The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.

“I know what I know,” he said earnestly, “many things will happen.  There is danger about the palace to-night—­danger it may be for you.  I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adon who has been kind to us.  You have brought us here when we were alone in America,” said Jarvo simply.  “Akko and I will help you now.  It was Akko who remembered the tower.”

Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an air of the most intense abstraction.  Yes, all these things were real.  They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking.  And yet what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being warned, and remembering the tower?

“Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines,” he told himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded sternly.

Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook.  The key was on a slender, carved ring, and it jingled.  And when he offered it to him Amory abstractedly took it.

“See, adon,” said Jarvo, “see!  In the ilex grove on the road that we took last night there is a white tower—­it may be that you have noticed it to-day.  That tower is empty, and this is the key.  There may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them.  You must come with me there to-night, the three.  Even then it may be too late, I do not know.  The gods will permit the possible.  But this I know:  the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily.  They are filled with rage against your people—­you and the king who is of your people.  I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for one moment in the palace.  I come to warn you.”

Amory’s pipe went out.  He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure situation.  And more than at any other time since his arrival on the island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.  What if St. George’s romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been hoping?  He leaned eagerly forward.