In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant implication of things imponderable, the personality of each persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St.George smiled a shade bitterly.

Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
Is love's uttermost gift so little?
But as the music swelled with premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof.

Then a veil hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train appeared.

There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post.

Last came Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious stones from which hung the strange green gem that St.George remembered.