"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.
"Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us dream all this. And father is safe after all."
"But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't possibly all be a dream, you know."
She met his eyes for a moment.
"Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this will give us all."
She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St. George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement, with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had answered that fancy of his by appearing.
A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them. His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were asleep.
As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall at the Palace of the Litany—that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so unexplainably interceded.