"Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
"I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my handkerchief-box."
As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St. George.
"Look up," she said.
He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace, and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open roof shone in the bright light that was set there--the light on the summit of the king's palace.
St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
"'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
* * * * * Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
"St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly; "don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and mine is only going."
"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined; "besides--mine is different."
"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood; and there, because the night would have it no other way, he stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe, and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.