The young king nodded.
"How can I bear it?" asked Lady Marie, raising her clasped hands to heaven. "Oh, your Highness, send out a searching party! Send fifty armed knights! Think what may happen at any moment!"
"Pshaw!" said Auguste Philippe the Twenty-fourth, "Victorine can take care of herself. She is four inches taller than I, and her arms are like iron. Let her be. She is foolish, but she has got to have her fling."
"In my day," said Lady Marie, "no modest girl would have suggested such a thing."
"I dare say," sighed his Majesty; "but the thing has got to come; they must sow their wild oats! She will come back all right."
Though Lady Marie did not know it, his Majesty Auguste Philippe then, as always, spoke the truth.
At that very moment, beyond the wide green plain, and beyond the sandy waste, a young knight, riding slowly, with his head bent down upon his breast, came upon a maiden sitting at the edge of a wood. Near her, cropping the grass, strayed a gray charger, with his bridle falling loose upon his neck. The maiden was curiously clad in shining armor, only her helmet was off, and tears were trickling down her cheeks. Now and then she dried them with strands of her yellow hair, and then she shuddered, gazing at a bloody spear that she held in her left hand.
"Fair lady," said the Knight, riding toward her, "tell me your trouble, that I may help you."
The Princess Olivera Rinalda Victorine looked up at him and sobbed, and her chain armor rose and fell upon her bosom. She had not cried this way since that memorable day on the stone bench in the garden, twelve years ago.
"I've—I've killed the Microbe!" gasped Princess Victorine.