what had made him
abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.

When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.

The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
she would have welcomed either.

For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
exercise his mind--on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.

Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.

"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings ha