noon
They had walked there , and had glimpsed the shadowy threshold of the Morning . Suppose , St. George thought , that instead of King Otho , with his delicate sense of the merely visible , a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque ? And instead of Mr. Frothingham , slave to the contestable , and Little Cawthorne in bondage to humour , and Amory and himself swept off their feet by a heavenly romance , suppose a party of savants and economists had arrived in Yaque , with a poet or two to bring away the fire -- what then ? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty . There could be no greater good , he chanted to the god who had breathed upon him , than this that he and Amory shared now with the wise and simple world , the world of the resonant new names . He even doubted that , save in degree , there could be a purer talisman than the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and licked his hand . And these were open secrets .