Geoffrey the Gipsy gazed after the young knight, who had suddenly walked away from him down the terrace. He put his pruning-knife back in his sheath and went to work again with the spade.
‘Drat these moles!’ he muttered.
But as he bent over the fresh-turned earth he did not see that the King’s Finder had halted again—this time at a distant bend in the terrace—and was now gazing back at him.
Giles was accustomed to find himself in thoughtful mood when he had come to the end of a talk with Geoffrey. But this calm and sunny morning he felt more stirred and uneasy in his heart than he had ever been before. He wondered why he had broken off the chat and hurried away. And then with sudden queer shame he knew he had been afraid—afraid lest when he had done cross-questioning, Geoffrey the Gipsy would turn and ask him what he meant to do with the shell.
He had come out this morning to get it for the Princess Sophronia. Now that the King had done with it he must make good his promise, and she should be allowed to listen to all the praise and flattery she could get. He found that he had to take it from a Gipsy gardener to carry it to a Princess Royal. And he did not like his mission at all. Those smooth-tongued courtiers, he thought to himself, would have said that he was taking it from the lowliest in the land to the highest. But as he looked back, that peaceful figure delving in the earth about the roses suddenly seemed to grow and grow against the sky—taller, stronger and more lasting than the towering castle itself. And when he put the shell in his pocket and turned to go on, Giles knew in his own heart that he was really taking it from the greatest to the smallest.
At the foot of the stone steps leading up to the courtyard, his mood was pleasantly changed by his meeting with the Countess Barbara. She was close to his own age of eighteen years, shorter than he but tall for a girl, graceful and slender. And Giles was reminded of the white roses he had just left as she smiled down a greeting to him. She was on her way, with two frisky black spaniels, to get water-lilies for the Queen Mother from the Lower Lake. Giles begged her to wait for him a moment while he did an errand. She said she would, if he would not be too long.
He dashed into the castle and up the great stairs to the Princess’s rooms.
Sophronia’s joy at getting the shell for her own at last seemed to Giles almost sad as she grabbed it from his hand with a happy squeal. Of late she had been growing a little hard of hearing; and in her fumbling eagerness to see if it still worked she nearly dropped it more than once. But at last she got it, growing warm already, to her ear. She heard the foreign prince—the one she hoped to marry—telling the Queen Mother that no stars in the heavens were so beautiful or bright as the eyes of his beloved Sophronia. (What the prince was really thinking was that no coins would look so beautiful or bright as the dowry-money he hoped to get from the King when he married his pest of an aunt. But he didn’t say that, so it didn’t spoil the Princess’s joy.)
And when Giles left her and went running down the steps to the Countess Barbara, the romantic Sophronia was seated at the window with the cold shell still clutched to her ear, smilingly waiting for more.