He wondered vaguely what such a woman, clothed with such power, would do if suddenly thwarted in a wish on which her heart was set?
And then it swept over him that she was no strange Egyptian princess, no sorceress of the Nile, no fairy of poet's fancy, but just the girl he had loved and lost and yet who had come back into his life in the dazzling splendour of her own day-dreams—one of the rulers of the world. He looked at her a moment and she seemed a being of another planet. He looked again and saw the laughing school-girl, his playmate on the red hills of his native state.
"Why so pensive, Jim?" she asked.
"It seems all a dream, Nan," he answered. "I'll rub my eyes and wake up directly. I thought your New York house a miracle. This is fairyland."
"Perhaps it would be," she said, looking at him a moment through half closed eyes, "if only the prince——"
A look of pain unconsciously clouded his face and the sentence was not finished.
CHAPTER VII
THE LAND OF THE SKY
On the fourth day Nan planned a coaching party to ascend Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Land of the Sky, the highest point of ground this side the Rockies. She had taken this trip with Stuart sixteen years before. She was then but fifteen, and he had just begun to dangle at her heels. She did not tell him their destination, but left him to discover for himself that they were travelling over the same old quiet road.