Peyrolles considered the interview had lasted long enough. He signed to the girl to retire with the air of a grandee dismissing some vassal. "Enough. Retire to your van till I come for you."
Flora pouted and pleaded: "Don’t be long. I’m tired of being in there."
Æsop snapped at her, sharply: "Do as you are told. You are not a princess yet."
The girl frowned, the girl’s eyes flashed, but her acquaintance with Æsop had given her the thoroughly justifiable impression that he was a man whom it was better to obey, and she retired into the caravan and shut the green-and-red door with a bang behind her.
Æsop turned with a questioning grin to Peyrolles. "Well?" he said.
Peyrolles looked approval. "I think she’ll do. I’ll go and find the prince at once."
"I will go a little way with you," Æsop said, more perhaps because he thought his company might exasperate the sham grand man than for any other reason. He knew Peyrolles would think it unbecoming his dignity to be seen in close companionship with the shabbily habited hunchback, hence his display of friendship. As he linked his black arm in the yellow-satin arm of Peyrolles, he added: "I have taken every care to make our tale seem plausible. The gypsies will swear that they stole her seventeen years ago."
Peyrolles nodded, looking askance at him, and wishing that destiny had not compelled him to make use of such an over-familiar agent, and the precious pair went over the bridge together and disappeared from the neighborhood of the little Inn, and the spirit of solitude seemed again to brood over the locality. But it was not suffered to brood for very long. As soon as the voices and the footsteps of Peyrolles and Æsop were no longer audible; the green-and-red door of the caravan was again cautiously opened, and cautiously the head of the pretty gypsy girl was thrust out into the air. When she saw that the pair had disappeared, she ran lightly down the steps of the caravan, and, crossing the common, paused under the windows of the Inn, where she began to sing in a sweet, rich voice a verse of a Spanish gypsy song:
| "Come to the window, dear; | |
| Listen and lean while I say | |
| A Romany word in your ear, | |
| And whistle your heart away." |