Walter Herold went on playing his exquisite miniatures of parts, and, in theatrical terminology, he became very expensive, and prospered exceedingly in his profession; his relations with John remained unaltered; Miss Lindon loved him, first because he was John's intimate, secondly (and here was a reason which she did not avow) because he had the gift of making her feel that, despite seven and fifty years of spinsterhood, she was still the most fascinating of her sex, and thirdly because he reminded her of poor Captain Featherstone, killed in the Zulu War, who was such a very clever amateur conjurer, and could act charades in a way that would make you die of laughing. And Unity came to him with her problems; and, as they both loved John Risca and Stellamaris, of whom (a thing undreamed of by John, for he rarely mentioned the fairy princess's name to Unity) they talked inordinately, the bond between them was strengthened by links ever freshly forged. And finally, in the sea-chamber at Southcliff, Herold maintained his rank of Great High Favourite, and companioned his august mistress on her fairy vagabondage along the roads that led no whither in the Land That Never Was.
And Stellamaris herself? She was twenty. John, still Great High Belovedest, still finding his perfect rest from care, his enchanted haven, in the great, wide-windowed room looking out to sea, wondered at the commonplace fact. Not long ago, it seemed to him, she had been but the fragile wraith of a child, with arms that you might pass through a signet-ring, and hands no bigger than an acacia-leaf. He had sat but yesterday full on the bed, without danger to the tiny feet which were far away from him. And now the little child had passed into the woman. Thanks to devotion, the world's learning, the resources of the civilized earth, the life-giving air of the sea, her malady had scarcely interfered with bodily growth. And the child's beauty had not been fleeting. It had remained, and matured into that of the woman. Unconsciously John had drifted away from childish things in his long and precious talks with her.
One day she rebuked him.
“Great High Belovedest,” she said, “you have n't told me of the palace and Lilias and Niphetos for months and months. Or is it years?”
He laughed. “It must be years. You don't realize that you 're grown up.”
“So every one says. I often wonder what it really means.”
“You 've developed,” said he.
“How?” she persisted.
“You've got longer and broader and—”
She laughed to hide a swift, pink confusion. “I know that, you silly dear. The doctor's always taking measurements of me and making funny calculations—cubing out the contents, as Mr. Wratislaw used to say. I know I'm enormous. That's an external matter of yards and feet,”—she spoke as if her proportions were Brobdingnagian,—“but I 'm referring to inner things. How am I different, in myself, from what I was four years ago?”