' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"

Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
that far-away house in McDougle Street--with the hokey-pokey man
outside the door--entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
prince should not see that.

"Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
announced clearly.

Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.

"Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
(in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
Crucified Sphinx.

"Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
more peculiar picture.

Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
Antoinette--Olivia in a walking frock of white broa