The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe with floating scarfs.
"It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
St. George shook his head distastefully.
"It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion of intuitive knowledge.
"There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly, "there's a cut--a sort of way with the seams, so to speak, sir, that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts every time."
"Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of 'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call up."
"Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man was a well-dressed man, sir, then as now."
As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked uncommonly well in the garments à la mode in Yaque. One would have said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV. The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest stageland because the colours were so good.
"I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be regular Tyrian purple."
Amory waved his long sleeves.
"Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he accused it.
"Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her consent to marry him?"