Pollyooly's face filled with horror; she came springing lightly down the castle wall; cried: "Don't do that, you naughty little boy!" and caught the prince a resounding slap on the cheek.
The pent-up feelings of the prince escaped in a loud yell. He loosed his preceptor and pressed a hand to his stinging cheek.
It was too much for the baron. He tore his hat from his head, flung it to earth, ground it into the earth with his heel, and flung his arms to heaven in one frenzied movement:
"Ach Gott!" he cried to the unregarding sky. "Thad a liddle Eengleesh-she-devil-child should strike a Hohenzollern!"
Moved by his emotion, Pollyooly looked at him in anxious surprise:
"It's all right," she said in a soothing voice. "You don't know how to manage him. He'll go like a lamb."
Her surmise (it could have been no more than a surmise) proved accurate. The prince went blubbering, but he went like a lamb.
It might be supposed that his proud, Hohenzollern blood would have boiled for hours at the blow. Nothing of the kind.
After a hearty lunch he rose and said firmly:
"I'm going to blay wiz Bollyooly."