Romance Island

He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies, breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale. All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.

He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to "fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St. George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet and the joy of the night.

"'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.' And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"

Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace--a woman's cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running with all his might.

"Coming!" he called, "where are you--where are you?" And his heart pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been Olivia's.