"I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated, searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!" The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly. "It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law. Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns, as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due ceremony--but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will do--upon one condition." "Oh--what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her eagerness, her voice was a betrayal. Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds, and without, in the Eurychôrus, a thousand people awaited the opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive people, to her marriage. The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design. "They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day. Do you not understand my condition?" CHAPTER XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in from the palace grounds and the Eurychôrus. Abroad among them--elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs to dawn, not dusk--was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths and maidens--who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells--waited with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old régime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a barbarian, the world over. All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.