e strange
forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
was powerless to receive it.

He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah--what if she did not guess
anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
dearer--nay, was nearer the Secret--than without her to pass the
veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples--one must
suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly