Romance Island eBook


“Oh—­what is that?” she asked, and for all the reticence of her eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.

Prince Tabnit turned to the window.  Below, in the palace grounds, and without, in the Eurychorus, a thousand people awaited the opening of the palace doors.  They filled the majestic avenue, poured up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward against the blue.  They were come, this strange, wise, elusive people, to her marriage.

The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.

“They know,” he said simply, “what was to have been at noon to-day.  Do you not understand my condition?”



Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in from the palace grounds and the Eurychorus.  Abroad among them—­elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs to dawn, not dusk—­was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself.  Especially the youths and maidens—­who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells—­waited with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind of god even to the immortals.  But there were also those who weighed the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old regime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a barbarian, the world over.



Project Gutenberg
Romance Island from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
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