“Madam,” said the king sternly, “I ask you the meaning of this pleasantry?”
“Pleasantry,” echoed the girl, staring at him with her hand upon a huge iron key, alert to run if this handsome maniac, strewn round by the wreckage of the bench he had broken, attempted to lay hands on her.
“Pleasantry?” she repeated; “that is a question I may well ask you. Who are you, sir, and what are you doing here?”
“Who I am, and what I am doing here, you know very well, because you brought me here. A change of garb does not change a well-remembered face,” and the king bowed to his visitor with a return of his customary courtliness, now that his suspicions were allayed, for he knew how to deal with pretty women. “Madam, there is no queen in Scotland, but you are queen by right of nature, and though you doff your gown, you cannot change your golden crown.”
The girl’s hand unconsciously went up to her ruddy hair, while she murmured more to herself than to him,—
“This is some of Catherine’s work.”
“Catherine was your name in the forest, my lady, what is your name in the castle?”
“Isabel is my name in castle and forest alike. You have met my twin sister, Catherine. Why has she brought you here?”
“Like an obedient son, I am here at the command of my honourable mother; and your sister—if indeed goddesses so strangely fair, and so strangely similar can be two persons—has gone to acquaint my mother of my arrival.”
The girl’s alarm seemed to increase as the king’s diminished. Trouble, dismay, and fear marred her perfect face, and as the king scrutinised her more minutely, he saw that the firm mouth and the resolute chin of her sister had no place in the more softened and womanly features of the lady before him.