Beloved of the gods! If she wasn't at that moment princess, queen and all the royal families made into one!
"But I must tell you this much," I insisted gently, "and then we won't speak of it again until you wish. Monsieur says your mother is only Regent until you come; that your destiny is marked out for you, that by every law of God and man you've got to go back and take up the Cross where you left it seventeen years ago,—that you're booked to marry a Prince, I think. And he's armed with an iron-bound authority to take you. He says you've no possible escape—though, of course, you won't want any. I have to tell you this," I continued more hastily, for it was an extremely difficult thing to say, "because I'm only an ordinary kind of American chap, as bad as the worst and as good as the best, but your court in Azuria would have forty duck fits if it knew we were playing together in the woods without a chaperone. Suppose you make me your Chancellor, or something like that—chancellor of your Oasian possessions! Then I can report for orders and escort you about with all propriety, and we can talk and laugh occasionally without having some big soldier stick me in the back with his halberd."
She had been listening attentively, gravely, to everything I said until this last, when she burst into a scream of laughter, rocking herself to and fro in a transport of merriment.
"You're the funniest thing I ever saw!—but so be it, Mr. Jack Brown-Bangs, et cetera, et cetera! I make you my Royal Chancellor, responsible for the welfare of our Oasis!"
"And for the protection of Your Serenity," I bowed, really feeling as if I'd been knighted.
"Thank you," she said gravely. "I couldn't ask for a braver protector. But, Chancellor," she looked at me with serious eyes, "why did you say I must take up my Cross? It sounded like such a direful prophecy."
My lips refused to speak. As a matter of fact, I had been thinking more about my own Cross; how I should have to carry it after she went away until my heart broke beneath its cruel weight.
"That was a careless way of meaning something else," I tried to answer lightly.
"You shouldn't say evasive things. It leads to speaking with two tongues, which Echochee has taught me is wrong."
"Well, it couldn't be a direful prophecy, anyhow, when your mother and your throne are waiting just around the corner, as it were. The direful part of your life has passed, and most appropriately your name has changed from Doloria to Princess—though, of the two, I prefer Doloria."