What the next hour held for them neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her fingers to his lips.
"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_ ?" There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not withdrawn from his.

And so he did tell her, told her all his heart as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and now he knew--now he knew.
"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her, "the night that I got there?
And yesterday, all day yesterday, you must have known--didn't you know?
I love you, Olivia.

I couldn't have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me.
Because I love you--I love you." She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at him in almost unearthly beauty.

He stood before her, waiting for the moment when she should lift her eyes.

And the eyes were lifted, and he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects heaven, and heaven comes down.
They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St.George half knelt beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
And because this fragment of the past since they had met was incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that future, clinging to each other's hands.