“It is indeed, my Wildenai,” he answered earnestly. “Never in all my travels, methinks, have I seen aught before like this your island here! It seems to me indeed a charmed land, a kind of magic isle!”
One day it rained, the last belated rain of winter. But even the storm brought pleasures of its own, for, seated on the pile of skins beside him, the little gray fox curled contentedly at her feet, Wildenai worked at her loom. Within its dull-colored warp a blanket, woven in a strange design of mingled red, and black, and white, grew slowly beneath her busy fingers.
For hours the maiden drew the short woolen threads in and out while the young man, stretched lazily upon the ground, told her many a tale of the England he had left. Then, quite without warning, she ceased her work and sat pensively watching through the opening in the rocks the long gray swell of the sea.
“And what is it now, my princess?” laughed young Harold. “The pattern is not yet finished, nor is the rain abated.”
“Ah, senor Harold lord,” wistfully replied the girl, “I was but wishing I had been born one of those same fair English maids with the eyes of blue and golden hair you tell about. Then would you love me even as you do them!” she added artlessly, and leaned her chin upon her hand, considering. A secret trembled on her lips.
“And how if I were Spanish born?” she questioned, and lifted hesitating, frightened eyes to his, “dark to look at, that I know well, but even so, the white man's kind of princess, who also has a throne?”
And all unwitting Lord Harold answered scornfully, “Spanish! Say no such word to me! The English hate the Spanish!” Fiercely he caught up a pebble and sent it whirling out across the water. “Even now their robber king plans his huge armada to take our queen and rule our land, but that, by the holy virgin herself, shall never be! Sooner will every drop of blood in bonny England be spilt. Never could I make thee understand how much I hope to be at home before he comes! Spanish indeed! Nay, never let me hear the hateful word again!”
Then, noting her puzzled, downcast face, with the impulsive changeableness which had so endeared him to her, he caught one little brown hand and raised it to his lips.
“But I do love thee even as thou art, my Wildenai,” he told her with the careless assurance of one much older speaking to a child. “Is not a wild rose sweet as any garden bloom? Nay, methinks 'tis often sweeter!”
Again he laughed and the little princess laughed with him now, for into her heart at his words had come a happiness so unlooked for and so wildly sweet as wholly to bewilder her. Quickly she rose, struck by a sudden thought, and running to the farthermost corner of the cavern she brushed aside a pile of leaves and lifted some stones, disclosing at length a box fashioned from the choicest cedar. Out of it, while the Englishman watched with wondering eyes, she drew a garment made of creamy doeskin, deeply fringed and trimmed besides with strings of wampum, the polished fragments of abalone shells and many-colored beads. Silently she brought it to him and when he touched it admiringly, for the dress was beautiful. “It is my marriage robe,” she told him gravely.