She opened it. Edward stood there.
"Shall we go down to supper?" he said, exactly as though they had been at a dance. And, indeed, they might have been at a dance, as far as their dress went, except that he wore a dinner-jacket in place of the tail-coat which dances demand.
He offered his arm, and she took it and they went together down the shallow, wide, polished, uncarpeted stairs on which the lamps from the corridor above threw the shadows of the slender, elegant balustrades.
"What a beautiful house!" she said. "And how nice of you to make yourself pretty for supper!"
"Well, we had to change into something, and I won't attack you with the obvious rejoinder. But you'll let me say, won't you, that you're like a princess in a fairy-tale? Did your fairy godmother give you a hundred dresses at your christening, each one more beautiful than the other?"
"She gave me something," the girl answered—"a secret amulet. It's invisible, but it brings me good fortune. It's brought me here," she added, "where everything is perfect. My room's lovely, and those stuffed sea-gulls over there . . . nothing else could have been absolutely right in that recess. How odd that I never knew before how much I loved stuffed sea-gulls," she added, meditatively.
He stopped in front of the sea-gulls. "I got a ring for you at Warwick," he said, "only I didn't dare to ask you to take it. Will you take it now? The other one was the symbol of something you didn't mean. Let this one stand for—whatever you will."
Without a word she held out her hand, so he set the diamond and crystal above the golden circlet.
"I am a fairy princess," she said then. "No one but a fairy princess ever had such a ring as this. Thank you, my Prince."