Then there came a day, not long afterward, when she made the speech which in some form or other he had been expecting and dreading. “The next glorious adventure will be when you take me over the palace.” He laughed awkwardly. “I remember telling you that the palace has run to seed.” “But you still live in it.” “No, dear,” said he. “Oh!” said Stellamaris in a tone of deep disappointment. “Oh, why, why?” John felt ridiculously unhappy. She believed, after all, in the incredible fairy-tale. “Perhaps it was n't such a gorgeous palace as I made out,” he confessed lamely. “As the cooks say, my hand was rather heavy with the gold and marble.” She laughed, to his intense relief. “I have felt since that there was a little poetic exaggeration somewhere. But it must be a beautiful place, all the same.” His spirits sank again. “I could walk about it blindfold, although we have n't talked of it for so long. Who is living there now?” “I 've sold it, dear, to some king of the Cannibal Islands,” he declared in desperate and ponderous jest. “So there's no more palace?” “No more,” said he. “I 'm sorry,” said Stellamaris--“so sorry.” She smiled at him, but the tears came into her eyes. “I was looking forward so to seeing it. You see, dear, I've lived in it for such a long, long time!” “There are hundreds of wonder-houses for you to see when you get strong,” said John, by way of consolation, yet hating himself. “Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle, and so on. Yes,” said Stella, “but they 've none of them been part of me.” So he discovered that, at one-and-twenty, on the eve of her entrance into the world of reality, the being most sacred to him still dwelt in her Land of Illusion. Two or three frank words would have been enough to bring down to nothingness the baseless fabric of his castle in the air, his palace of dreams; but he dreaded the shock of such seismic convulsion. He had lied for years, putting all that was godlike of his imperfect humanity into his lies, so as to bring a few hours' delight into the life of this fragile creature whom he worshiped, secure in the conviction that the lies would live for ever and ever as vital truths, without chance of detection. And now that chance, almost the certainty, had come.