"It's the most beautiful coat in the world," she said, and her voice, like her face, was transfigured. She turned her shoulders to him that he might lay the coat on them, slipped her arms into the sleeves, and wheeled to confront him, her face alight with a mingled tenderness and gaiety that turned him, for a moment, faint and giddy.
"You really like it, Princess?" he faltered.
"I love it," she made answer; "and now, my lord, will you take me in your nice new motor-car to my unworthy hotel, that I may pay my miserable bill and secure my despicable luggage? Even a princess, you know, can't go to the world's end without a pair of slippers, a comb, and a clean pocket-handkerchief."
With that she was in the car, and he followed, gasping, in the sudden wave of enchantment that had changed the world. What had happened? Why had she suddenly changed? How had the cloud vanished? Whence had the cloud arisen?
His heart, or his vanity, or both, had been too bruised by the sudden blow to recover all in a minute. His brain, too, was stunned by the lack of any reason in what had happened. Why had she not been glad to see him? Why had she so suddenly turned from a cold stranger to her very self? What had worked the bad magic? Not, surely, the sight of a friend two days before she expected that sight? What had worked the good magic? It was not thinkable that any magic at all could be worked by a fur coat or even by the foresight that had provided it. His mind busied itself with such questions and felt no pain in them because it knew that his heart held in reserve, to be contemplated presently, the glorious fact that the good magic had, somehow, been wrought. But he would not call his heart into court yet. So that it was in silence that he drove through the steep streets. His own slight luggage was already at the back of the car, and when hers was added to it and they had left the town behind he still said nothing but the few words needed to such little matters as the disposing of the luggage and the satisfying of the hotel porter.
And when all the tall, stuccoed houses were left behind and they were rushing smoothly through the fresh morning, with the green sea on one side and the green marshland on the other, still he did not speak and kept his eyes on the white ribbon of road unrolling itself before him. It was just as they passed the third Martello tower that her hand crept under his arm. He took his from the steering-wheel for a moment to lay it on hers, and after that his heart had its way, and the silence, though still unbroken, was no longer the cloak for anxious questionings, but the splendid robe of a tender, tremulous joy.
They sped on; through Dymchurch, where the great sea-wall is, and where the houses are built lower than the sea, so that the high tide laps against the sea-wall level with the bedroom windows of the little houses that nestle behind its strong shelter.
It was she who spoke then. "Isn't it a dear little place?" she said. "Wouldn't you like to live in a Martello tower? They have one beautiful big room with a Norman-looking pillar in the middle, and a down-stairs part for kitchens, and an up-stairs, where the big gun is, that you could roof in for bedrooms. I should like a Martello! Don't you want to buy one? You know they built them to keep out Napoleon—and the canal as well—but no one uses them now. They just keep fishing-nets in them and wheelbarrows and eel-spears."
"Let's buy the haunted one," he said, and hoped that his voice was steady, for it was not of haunted towers that he desired to speak. "A soldier's ghost walks there; the village people say 'it's one of them there Roman soldiers that lived here when them towers was built in old ancient Roman times.'"