"It was very little," said the American princess apologetically, "but I did what I could."
"What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
"Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after to-morrow I am to be married."
"That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack. And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
Olivia shook her head.
"You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the hollow of his hand."
"Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
Olivia laughed--her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
"Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would it not?"
"It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart he said, "and so it is."
"It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss of far waters, "and when you look down there--and when you look up, you nearly know. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
"Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed. Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for instance, over muffins and tea."
"It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
"It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.