"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at other things. To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism. When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle. All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth. Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent sword of "To-morrow, at noon." CHAPTER XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace--a hurry of grey banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the lowland and on the toiling water.