“Yes, your Highness.” He tried to remember what he had said to her that day in the archbishop's garden. Two or three things came back and the color remounted his cheeks.
“Have you forgotten what you said to me?”
“I dare say I was impertinent,” vaguely.
“Ah, you have forgotten, then!”
In all his life he never felt so ill at ease. To what did she refer? That he would be proud to be her friend? That if the princess was as beautiful as the maid he could pass judgment?
“Yes, you have forgotten. Do you not remember that you offered to be my friend?” She read him through and through, his embarrassment, the tell-tale color in his cheeks. She laughed, and there was nothing but youth in the laughter. “Certainly you are afraid of me.”
“I confess I am,” he said. “I can not remember all I said to you.”
Suddenly she, too, remembered something, and it caused the red of the rose to ripple from her throat to her eyes. “Poor dog! Not that they hated him, but because I love him!” Tears started to her eyes. “See, Monsieur Carewe; princesses are human, they weep and they love. Poor dog! My playmate and my friend. But for you they might have killed him. Tell me how it happened.” She knew, but she wanted to hear the story from his own lips.
His narrative was rather disjointed, and he slipped in von Mitter as many times as possible, thinking to do that individual a good turn. Perhaps she noticed it, for at intervals she smiled. During the telling he took out his handkerchief, wiped the dog's head with it, and wound it tightly about the injured leg. The dog knew; he wagged his tail.
How handsome and brave, she thought, as she observed the face in profile. Not a day had passed during the fortnight gone that she had not conjured up some feature of that intelligent countenance; sometimes it had been the eyes, sometimes the chin and mouth, sometimes the shapely head. It was wrong; but this little sin was so sweet. She had never expected to see him again. He had come and gone, and she had thought that the beginning and the end. Ah, if only she were not a princess! If only some hand would sweep aside those insurmountable barriers called birth and policy! To be free, to be the mistress of one's heart, one's dreams, one's desires!