“He's delightful,” said Lucilla; “so simple and unassuming, and unspoiled. And so romantic—like one of Daudet's rois en exil. And he has such nice eyes, and such a nice slim athletic figure. Do you think it's true that his people have no hope of coming to the throne? I've felt it in my bones that we should meet him again, ever since that night at the Lido. I knew it was all an act of Destiny. How wonderfully he speaks English—and thinks and feels it. He has quite the English point of view—he can see a joke. Oh, I've entirely lost my heart, and if I weren't restrained by a sense of my obligations as a married woman I should make the most frantic love to him.”
Ruth lay back in her chair, and shook her head, and laughed.
“Oh, your swans, your swans,” she murmured.
“Dear Lady Disdain,” said Ponty, regarding her with an eye that was meant to wither, “it is better that a thousand geese should be mistaken for swans, than that a single swan should be mistaken for a goose. Oh, your geese, your geese!”
“Dear Lord Sententious,” riposted Ruth, “what is the good of making any mistake at all? Why not take swans for swans, geese for geese, and blameless little princelings for blameless little princelings? Yes, your little princeling seemed altogether blameless, an exceedingly well-meaning, well-mannered little princeling, but I saw no play of Promethean fire about his head, and when he spoke it sounded as if any normally intelligent young man was speaking.”
“Had you expected,” Pontycroft with lofty sarcasm inquired, “that, like the prince in The Rose and Ring, he would speak in verse?”
But next morning, in the most unexpected manner, she totally changed her note. Pontycroft found her seated in the sun on the lawn. It was a cool morning, and the sun's warmth was pleasant. Here and there a dewdrop still glistened, clinging to a spear of grass; and the air was still sweet with the early breath of the earth. In her lap lay side by side an open letter and an oleander-blossom. Her eyes, Pontycroft perceived, were fixed upon the horizon, as those of one deep in a brown study.
“You mustn't mind my interrupting,” he said, as he came up. “It's really in your own interest. It's bad for your little brain to let it think so hard, and it will do you good to tell me what it was thinking so hard about.”
Slowly, calmly, Ruth raised her eyes to his. “My little brain was thinking about Prince Charming,” she apprised him, in a voice that sounded grave.
Pontycroft's wrinkled brow contracted.