Then the prince laughed out joyfully.
“Ay,” he cried, “seem different, indeed! There are many and many who may do that. But this man speaks truth and out of his spadeful of earth we have learned it, We are all alike, all of us who live!”
With that he grasped his tiny sword and flew to the side of the princess and lifted her hand in his. And with a swift, deft stroke he cut from her wrist the bracelet that was like a fetter, and he took her in his arms.
“Ah, my princess,” he cried. “You have seemed different from us all only because you would have it so!”
The Princess Romancia looked round on the court, and suddenly she saw only the friendliness which had always been there if she could have believed. She looked on her father and mother, the king and the queen, and she saw only tenderness. She looked on the day labourer and his family and understood that, fairy and princess though she was, she was like them and they were like her. Last, she looked in the face of the prince—and she did not look away.
Invisibly, as the hours leave a dial, the fairies drifted from the little room and back to the fairy ring among the old oaks to dance for very joyousness. The labourer and his family, hearing them go, were conscious of a faint lifting of the dark, as if morning were coming, bringing a new day. And to the Princess Romancia, beside Prince Hesperus, the world itself was a new world, where she did not walk alone as she had thought, but where all folk who will have it so walk together.
VIII
TWO FOR THE SHOW
First of all there was Every Day, with breakfast, lunch, outdoors, dinner, and evenings.
Then there were Sundays, which were quite another kind of time, as different as layer cake from sponge cake: With breakfast late, and mustn’t-jump-rope, and the living-room somehow different, the Out-of-doors moved farther off, our play-house not waiting for us but acting busy at something else in which we had no part; the swing hanging useless as it did when we were away from home and thought about it in the night; bells ringing as if it were their day; until we were almost homesick to hear the grocer’s cart rattle behind the white horse.