“I thought, perhaps.... Never mind. What I was about to tell you is, that I explored your pantry with better success than you did when you prepared my supper. You overlooked a cake fit for a prince—Eh? What? Oh, merely an exclamation? It is a miracle of beauty to look at—and, to eat! Who made it? I ask, because the cooker of that cake has the soul of an artist. I wish to spend my days in the shadow of her wing.”
“I made it.” She blushed, happily, under the royal praise.
“You? Put a raisin in your diadem, as its central jewel!”
“You will not mock at the ‘museum’ any more when I tell you that I found the recipe for that cake in an old parchment. The Countess of Mountjoye invented the cake first in 1715 for the Prince of Paradis: and history says she was the only one of his sweethearts who never lost his affection. So, you see, it was always a ...” (she paused, changed the phrase she was about to use, namely, “a prince’s cake” into) “a cake fit for a prince.”
“And she never lost his affection? I can well believe it! For I feel tender toward her, even two hundred years later. But, since I cannot lay my royal heart at her feet, I consign it to that spot on the rug just between your two silver-toed slippers. Ah!” he sighed.
“Are you feeling any pain now?” respectfully. He was vaguely conscious of a change in her manner but, being ignorant of the cause, attached no importance to it, as yet.
“From the cake? By no means!”
“From your wound.” Her manner reproached him for his flippancy. Then she remembered that he did not know how close his would-be captor lay; and that, even if he were not wounded, it would be almost impossible for him to slip away from Villa Rose, to pursue his glad, free wanderings, unless perhaps she could devise some subtle disguise to aid him—even as the medieval ladies, in Hibbert Mearely’s old books, passed their gentlemen, royal and otherwise, out of compromising situations.
“Oh none,—none” he answered. “I’ve forgotten I was ever at the wrong end of a gun.”
She pushed the big chair toward him.