Adventure stories; Islands -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; South Pacific Ocean -- Fiction
St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
go toward him.
He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
"You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
possible?"
Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
through his veins with magic.
"Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
She looked at him breathlessly.
"Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
what is the population of the island?"
At that they both laughed--the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
that was enchanting.
"Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
here, at all events. Now tell me--oh, tell me. I can't believe it
until you tell me."
She moved a little away from the door.
"Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
you must be very tired."
St. George shook his head.
"Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
and show you the whole world."
She went quite simply and without hesitation--because, in Yaque, the
maddest things would be the truest--and when she had stepped from
the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
garden terrace.
"If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
the dark?"
St. George laughed happily.
"I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
round the other way."
They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
she was that truth and that joy.
"I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
"Believe--what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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