“Ay,” laughed Ralph, “she was younger, but her face lacked its present fire in the London days.”
“What!” cried Gyll, “you saw her there?”
“Nay, nay,” he returned quickly, “’tis a delusion of my addled brain.”
She looked down at his incongruous beard, and then into the youthful eyes indulgently. “Poor boy!”
“Poor boy!” he echoed. “You call me nothing but ‘poor boy.’”
“Nay, nay, your Majesty,” she contradicted, mocking his assumed haughtiness. “When have I said such a thing before?”
“Was it not when I—” But Ralph hesitated. “Oh no, perhaps not,” he added, quickly, and rambled back to the praise of her appearance.
“If your Majesty will permit me,” she said, complacently, “I will pull on my stockings.”
To this he made a strange rejoinder. “Mistress Croyden, you are a prophetess, a sibyl who reads the future.”