They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear. And because this fragment of the past since they had met was incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is bounded for every heart that beats.
"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new language of their own accord?
"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess. But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when "trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then: "But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world that you can never, never get back?"
Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it back. To prove that that was not incredible, St. George turned until his lips brushed her wrist.
"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming they will sometime know?"
Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of that."
"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he whimsically remembered something else: "You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."