"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time enough in there--when they ask me. Just for now I only want to think how wonderful this is."
She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one of all the things which he did not mean.
"Is it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I wish I knew!"
He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her fingers to his lips.
"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what will happen--oh, may I tell you now?"
There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart as he had known his heart to be that last night on The Aloha, and in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and now he knew--now he knew.
"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her, "the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you must have known--didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me. Because I love you--I love you."
She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque. He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects heaven, and heaven comes down.