“I thank you,” she replied, with simple dignity. “I will send at once for the miniature.”
“Let me go!” pleaded Lissa; “let me do this much to atone, Daria.”
“So you shall,” replied the princess, clapping her hands softly, and as she did so another attendant, a tall, raw-boned lad, in a serf’s dress, appeared.
“Take Konrat and go,” she said to Vassalissa, “and let your feet be fleet as the raven’s wings, Lissa, for a good man is in trouble for our folly.”
Her little cousin needed no second bidding, but ran off, with the serf, in the direction of the Bielui-gorod. And the Princess Daria, after a few words to the duenna, walked a little apart on a mossy bank below the fountain, and then signed to me to follow her. I supposed that she intended to question me about the czarevna, but she did not. The sun was shining on her, as if it loved her, and her veil made a filmy white hood above her charming face.
“You are from France, sir,” she said softly; “will you tell me something of that far-off land—more than I have learned in books? Is your home in that great city where the king lives?”
“Nay, mademoiselle,” I replied, surprised and pleased, “my home is in a province of France, called Normandy, and from the turrets of my house I can see the waves sweep wild and free on a long stretch of hard, white beach, and the smell of the salt is in the air, and there is ever the deep boom of the ocean. When the day breaks there is a whiteness on the sea, and when the night falls, a shadow, and the stars shine on the water. And the turf is green there, and the trees and flowers come to an earlier budding, and I think, too, the birds sing more sweetly. And there are orchards, and fields of grain, and you can see the cattle standing, ankle-deep, in the stream that runs across the meadows below the château, and——” I broke off; presently I should tell her more than I cared to have her know.
She had listened attentively, her eyes on the distance, and as I paused, she sighed softly.
“It must be a fair country,” she said. “I see you love it, sir—but I thought you were a goldsmith from Paris,” and she darted one of her keen looks at me.
It was now my turn to redden. “I am from Paris last, Princess,” I said, “but I am Norman-born.”