“Yes!” she cried. “Prince Run-Away!”
“There are several kinds of vagabonds, my dear; and neither palace nor cottage walls can hold them! Nor catch and cage them again, once they have escaped.” Even as he said it, he knew that it was less true, at that moment, than it had been before he entered the strange house and encountered the fairy princess in the museum.
“If he knew that his own Secret Service is lurking just outside, to snatch him back into his palace-prison!” she thought. Aloud she said, timidly:
“But there’s the law.”
“What law is there that can’t be broken?” he demanded.
“Don’t you know,” she answered, “that there is a law that can’t be broken? It was made for us, by something stronger than we are; and it says that human beings must live together, in families and groups. Because the need of brotherhood is the strongest thing in them. And that need is the law. Have you never felt it, Prince Run-Away?”
He looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he said, seriously:
“There is always need of love—true love. But there is so much counterfeit love in the world, Rosamond. To pass all the little waving false hands safely—losing no grain of faith, nor drop of tenderness by the way—and come, at last, and fold your heart’s wings softly in two tender, loyal hands, which will never weary and never unclasp——”
She surrendered her hands, willingly. It would be something sweet to remember all her life, how a prince had held them tenderly.
“Do you know—in the twilight, as I came along through the rushes of the river-path—I made a little poem to you? I did not know it was to you.”