Didn't I step proudly forward, make my best bow, and do a Russian folk dance step that I had learned in New York.
The princess was delighted, and congratulated me most warmly, saying that it was a pleasure to meet so accomplished a pony.
I bowed again and again. It was a perfect delight to me to take something out of my little bag of tricks here, for I was never forced to do anything that I did not wish to. All the Devering family had a horror of the cruelties usually connected with the training of animals in tricks unnatural to them.
While I stood scraping and bowing, I heard Mrs. Duff telling her friend that there were not skilled maids in this family as there were in the Good American's, but every child was taught how to do every bit of household work accomplished on the place.
The princess' weary face became interested, and when a few minutes later I returned, stepping carefully along the veranda, for I was harnessed to a tea-waggon, she indulged in a really hearty peal of laughter.
"But this is charming," she ejaculated, clapping her slender hands together. "Altogether charming!" and she took off her gloves.
Dallas had heaped the waggon high with every dainty he could find in the pantry, and the princess, who had evidently had little lunch, ate olives and honey and bread and chicken sandwiches and wound up with hot buttered toast from a plate that Bingi brought in.
He had heard us in the kitchen and had run down from the green cottage where he spent all his spare time with his pretty Japanese wife.
The princess poured the tea and she and Mrs. Duff drank theirs with lemon and sugar and no cream.
Dallas, with a hand shaking with excitement, gave his mother her cup and bending over the hammock murmured, "Funny little mother with her foreign ways."