May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried.

"I, who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth, drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept the one thing dearer than these." He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the embroidered laces on his breast.

Then quietly and in another voice he began to speak.
With the first words there came to St.George the thrill of something that had possessed him--when?
In that ecstatic moment on _The Aloha_ when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a land which no one can define or remember--only desire;" in the divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes and touched his lips.

Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own--a shell, a duty, a vista--he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying.

He listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the prince in understanding.