"If you find fairyland, it ought to be while the heather moon shines," I told him. "But I shan't have much time to help you look for it, because in five days you'll be leaving me with mother, and travelling on alone. You must search for the key to the rainbow wherever you go; because, you know, it might be anywhere, and the light of the heather moon would show it gleaming in the grass, or under a flower, or even in the middle of the road before your eyes."
He looked at me in an odd, almost wistful way, and I couldn't look away from him, though I wanted to, for it was as if he were reading my inmost Me—using my eyes for windows, of which I couldn't draw the curtains.
"You might find the key, if you haven't got it already," he said. "Anyhow, I can't find it without your help, But no matter. Perhaps I shouldn't know what to do with it if I did, now I've grown old and disillusioned."
Then I answered, because I couldn't help it under the spell of his eyes. "You're not old or disillusioned. You're a Knight: and knights who rescue damsels are always young and brave."
Before I saw him, if any one had told me a person of over thirty was not middle-aged, I should have thought it nonsense. But now I see that even thirty-four is not old. It seems exactly the right age for a man.
"If you dub me Knight, I christen you Princess," said he, laughing as if embarrassed, yet pleased. "Because, I confess I wandered near enough to the border last night, to think of you as a princess who'd been shut up in a glass retort, as all really nice princesses were in my day, in fairyland. Now the retort has been opened, though the princess believed it to be hermetically sealed——"
"It was the knight who opened it!" I interrupted him. "But did you really go near to the border?"
"The border of fairyland."
"Oh! I meant Scotland. But, after all, to me it seems much the same thing. Doesn't it to you?"
"I haven't thought of it so for a good many years," he said. "Yet it might be——"