CHAPTER III
I mind me that when she had drawn from me all she had wanted to know, the little lady’s pert tongue became still for a while, and that she stretched her long young limbs and lay back upon her mound of hay with the most absolute unconcern either of my presence or of the Princess’s, gazing skyward with a sudden gravity in her look. As for me, I was content to sit in silence too, glad of the quiet, because it gave me leisure to taste the full zest of this fortunate and singular meeting. I thought I had never seen a human being whom silence became so well as the Princess Ottilie. Contrasted with the recklessness and chatter of her companion her attitude struck me as the most perfectly dignified it had ever been my lot to observe.
Presently the nymph in yellow roused herself from her reverie, and sat up, with her battered hat completely on one side and broken bits of grass sticking in the tangled mass of her brown hair. She arched her lip at me with her malicious smile, and addressed her companion.
“Is it your Highness’s pleasure,” she asked, “that I should gratify some of this young English nobleman’s curiosity concerning the wandering of a Princess in so unprincely a fashion?”
“Ach!” rebuked her Highness, on the wings of a soft sigh. The truth of the girl’s assertion that her mistress’s kindness of heart amounted to weakness, was very patent; the dependant was undoubtedly indulged to the verge of impertinence, although it is also true that her manner seemed to stop short of any open show of disrespect.
“Now attention, please, Monsieur de la Faridondaine! His Most Absolutely to be Revered and Most Gracious Serenity, father of her Highness, reigns over a certain land, a great many leagues from here,” she began, with all the gusto of one who revels in the sound of her own voice. “Her Highness is his only daughter, and this August Person has the condescension to feel for her some of those sentiments of paternal affection which are common even to the lowest peasant. You have been about Courts, Monsieur Jean Nigaud, the fact is patent and indubitable. You can therefore realise the extent of such condescension. A little while ago, moved by these sentiments, my gracious Sovereign believed there was a paleness upon her Highness his daughter’s cheek.”
Involuntarily I looked at the Princess, to see, with a curious elation, how the rich colour rushed, under my gaze, yet more richly into her face.