She stood still, with an exclamation of surprise.
"Is that possible? I thought all Indian princes mixed with English people.
Many, indeed, go to England to be educated—"
"So I have heard," he broke in, with a faint haughtiness. "I am not one of them."
"Yet you speak the language so perfectly!" she said.
A gleam of naive pleasure shone out of his dark eyes.
"I am glad you think so. My—one of my ministers taught me."
They walked on again. Here and there she stopped to look at some curious plant—always a little in advance of him—so that he had opportunity to study the hundred things about her which confirmed his wondering, increasing admiration. Slight as she was, there was yet a gracefully controlled strength in every movement. In his own mind, poor as it necessarily was in comparisons, he compared her to a young doe he had once startled from its resting-place. There was the same fragile beauty, the same grace, the same high-strung energy. In nothing was she like the women painted for him by his father's hand—things for idle, sensuous pleasure, never for serious action.
Plunged in a happy confusion of thought, he had once more relapsed into silence, from which she startled him with a question evidently connected with their previous conversation.
"And so you have lived all your life in this lovely garden?" she said, looking up at him with a grave wonder in her eyes.
"All my life," he answered.