She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece, and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid, graphic, delineated not by light but by line. The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white, and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly." ("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast, after all, to the prince _we are_ the foreigners. There is something in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince--he is so very metaphysical!") Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world--the world was an intaglio of his own designing.