‘Yes, do. I suppose it’s some one come to buy this Princess.’
‘Oh, is it?’ and Wopole went to open the door.
The Princess meanwhile quietly slipped upstairs and took the feather out. In a few moments she heard a voice calling her, and she went down. She found the Prince with the other two in the little parlour.
‘Good-morning, Ernalie,’ he said; and she answered, ‘Good-morning.’
‘This absurd man,’ the Prince went on, ‘insists that you shall be weighed, although I offered him two thousand ounces of gold; and I’m sure you don’t weigh that. However, he will have you weighed, and it can’t be helped.’
‘I suppose it can’t,’ said the Princess.
So she was weighed. It doesn’t matter what she did weigh, but it was less than two thousand ounces. The Prince ordered the two men whom he had brought with him as bearers of the gold, to stop and see it properly weighed out, and then he set out with the Princess for the town.
‘I thought you wouldn’t mind there not being an escort,’ he said apologetically; ‘but all the people about the Palace are busy preparing for a festival.’
The Princess said she didn’t mind at all.
She had not had much time to think about what she had heard Wopole and Mumkie say, nevertheless she determined to tell the Prince all she had heard.