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 had kept saying. "What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think? That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least, that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but chess is really up and down poetic'" Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in silence. "Um," he had responded liberally. "I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us." "That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly at this juncture. "Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts." Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in loneliness on the very veranda. Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed. "I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you." He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped. "I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without vagueness. Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy scrutiny of the intruder. "No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course. But--do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"