'No,' eagerly, 'nor mine don’t. Queen, I mean,—but she isn’t a mother, mercy, no! I only wear silk dresses every day, not my velvet ones. This silk one is getting a little faded.'
She released one hand to smooth the dress wistfully. Then she remembered her painfully practiced little speech and launched into it hurriedly.
'Hear, O Prince. Verily, verily, I did not know which color you 'd like to find me dressed in—I mean arrayed. I beseech thee to excuse—oh, pardon, I mean—'
But she got no further. She could endure the delay no longer, and her eyes flew open.
She had known his step; she had known his voice. She knew his face. It was terribly freckled, and she had not expected freckles on the face of the Prince. But the merry, honest eyes were the Prince’s eyes. Her gaze wandered downward to the home-made clothes and bare, brown legs, but without uneasiness. The Prince had explained about his clothes. Suddenly, with a shy, glad little cry, the Princess held out her hands to him.
The royal blood flooded the face of the Prince and filled in all the spaces between its little gold-brown freckles. But the Prince held out his hand to her. His lips formed for words and she thought he was going to say, 'Verily, Princess, thou hast found favor—'
'Le’ ’s go fishin',' the Prince said.
THE TWO APPLES
JAMES EDMUND DUNNING
WHEN the morning of the sixteenth day broke out from the gray battlements to the east’ard, only two live men remained on the raft which more than two weeks before had left the splintered side of the barkentine; besides, there was one dead man, and his body counted three out of a dozen who had clung to the raft until ten starved to death because they could not live on red apples and brine.
Zadoc roused as much as a man can when every morning he wakens less and less until some day he does not waken at all. Jeems lay staring at the sun as at a stranger’s face.