Romance Island

In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face wore an expression of settled melancholy.

"Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that does for a man, sir."

St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.

"Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain with us?"

Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were, his never-lifted mask.

"Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do whatever makes him the most useful."

"Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same. But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"

Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its lines of misery.

"I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I was to try it alone, sir--"

Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.

"That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin, one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove. He can conduct the way to the vessel."

"Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction, "something is always sure to turn up, sir."

From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice round which the priests and hierodouloi had been wont to dance, and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal "Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory, with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his reflections of the night.