“Well, if it was roast beef.”
“Don’t you have roast beef for dinner of a day?”
“Only on Sundays, your Highness. Week-days we have mostly porridge for dinner, or, for a treat now and again, a sop in the pan of barley-bread.”
“And what do you have for pudding?” inquired the Prince, as Wynkin removed the thrust-aside plate and placed a dish of quince tarts on the table all heaped up with whisked cream stuck over with sugar-plums; “sweets, you know.”
“At the sight of her he slid down from his corner and went and sat in a large high arm-chair.”
“Oh, we don’t have them at all, except at Christmas, which comes but once a year, worse luck. A little sour buttermilk sometimes perhaps, but sweet things, bless your heart, no.”
“Oh, yes, you do,” said Charles, with a merry twinkle in his eye; “you have the sweetest thing of all—liberty.”
“Why, yes, that is true,” admitted Wynkin, gazing down sorrowfully at the boy.
“And I wish I were you, Wynkin,” went on Charles, all the clouds darkening his face again. “It’s dreadful to be a King’s son, I can tell you; and treated as if I’d done something wrong, and I haven’t—I haven’t.”