Adventure stories; Islands -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Love stories; Science fiction; South Pacific Ocean -- Fiction
She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
heaven, and heaven comes down.
They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
bounded for every heart that beats.
"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
language of their own accord?
"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
"trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
"But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
that you can never, never get back?"
Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned
until his lips brushed her wrist.
"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
they will sometime know?"
Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
that."
"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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