The next day Pollyooly followed the prince to the end of his royal progress twice; and she had little doubt that she would be able to draw him into the battle for which she yearned, for he never saw her without scowling darkly upon her.
On the second day the Honourable John Ruffin returned from his golf in time to lunch with the two children; and he informed Pollyooly that he proposed to spend the afternoon on the sand with them. They found Mrs. Gibson with her children; and she accompanied them to the spot at which the prince usually turned in his course. Twenty yards beyond it the Honourable John Ruffin bade Pollyooly build a castle; and then he and Mrs. Gibson left her and the Lump to build it, and retiring to the sea-wall forty yards away, they sat down and fell into polite conversation. As they left her, the Honourable John Ruffin's last words to Pollyooly were:
"I don't forbid you to scratch him. Scratching is harmonious with the female nature."
The statement afforded Mrs. Gibson grounds for the beginning of their polite conversation.
Pollyooly and the Lump worked steadily away at the building of the castle. Pollyooly did the digging; now and again the Lump would pat a wall placidly. They had been at work for rather more than half an hour; and the castle was already beginning to wear the rotund air so dear to the eye of the builder when the progressive prince came in sight.
Pollyooly's joyful heart began to beat quickly. He was slouching along to his doom nearly fifty yards in front of the fragrant baron; and since there were children to annoy all the way, he came but slowly. It gave Pollyooly time to lead the Lump half-way to Mrs. Gibson, and send him toddling the rest. She was back at her castle, and at work again when the prince caught sight of her.
He stopped short, his unhasty mind slowly taking in the situation. That she should be working in loneliness, thirty yards beyond the line of nurses and children along the beach, seemed too good to be true. Presently his unhurrying mind grasped the fact that it was true; his heart blazed in his bosom; he threw back his head and, had his nose been larger, he would have sniffed the breeze like a warhorse. He advanced upon her in a quick, shambling slouch.
Pollyooly saw his eager advance; but she affected not to see it. She was eager for the fray, but fearful lest a display of that eagerness should dash the royal courage; moreover she wished the prince to be flagrantly the aggressor. She worked at the farther wall of the castle with her back to him. A fray was the last thing the prince looked for. There had been but one fray in his sheltered life: with a brother prince carelessly admitted to his society. A fray with a child not of the blood royal was beyond dreaming. He sprang on to the castle wall and began to stamp and kick a breach in it with furious, but clumsy, energy.
Then Pollyooly turned and sprang. The prince was hardly aware of her spring; he was only aware of a stinging smack, and then the shock of her impetus toppled him over on to his back on the sand. Pollyooly came down too, but not on the sand; she came down on the prince, and far more heavily than her fragile air warranted. Before he could collect any scattered wits he may have chanced to have, she was kneeling astride him, with a painful, grinding knee on either of his arms, and slapping his face.
The Honourable John Ruffin walked briskly down from the sea-wall with a smile of profound pleasure on his face. The perfumed baron had not yet perceived his charge's plight.