Dressed in white, and as fresh and cool as the morning, Judith was already in her place, at the head of the table, hospitably entrenched behind the coffee pot.
She looked up at the King, with her customary little nod, and friendly smile.
"You slept? You are rested? It was dreamless sleep? Good boy!" she said.
And she poured out his coffee.
From that moment, they fell, easily and naturally, into their usual routine.
Intimate conversation, with the Imps at the table, was out of the question. An occasional glance, a sympathetic smile, was all that could pass between them. The King was well content to have it so. He was pleasantly conscious that the accord between them, which had been so inexplicably broken, for a time, the night before, was completely restored. Their friendship was unimpaired. Nothing else mattered. Looking at Judith, cool, competent, and self-contained, as she was, he found himself almost doubting the actuality of the emotional crisis of the night before. Had that scene in the night nursery been a dream? A mere figment of his own fevered, disordered imagination?
The birds whistled, and called cheerily from the sunlit greenness of the garden.
The Imps chattered like magpies as they attacked their porridge.
It was a merry, informal, delightfully domestic meal.
This, it seemed to the King, was his only real life. That other life of his in the palace, guarded, night and day, by the soldiery, and the police, was the illusion, was the dream.