Her eyes were hidden by her drooping eyelashes. "You will return--yes?" she asked, without looking up. He smiled rather wistfully. "'When the red-breasted robins are nesting,'" he quoted slowly, "'I shall come.'" The clock ticked wearily on.... A few drops of rain fell upon the roof. "Monsieur"--the crimson in her cheeks deepened--"you must not smile; but it is in my book, here." She took from the table _The Fairy Prince_, and handed it to him. He gazed at it with a seriousness he might have shown towards a book of Scottish theology. "You know, monsieur"--she appeared deeply concerned in the design of the geranium table-cover--"I never leave the mill-house unless to attend mass, and sometimes--perhaps you would think so, too--it is very lonesome; no brother, no sister, just Louis and my uncle." He nodded, and, with an air of abstraction, his brow wrinkled sympathetically, and his fingers strummed five-finger exercises on the table. "It must be very dull," he said. "But no, monsieur"--her eyes looked up in protest--"not dull--just lonesome." He sustained an imaginary note with his little finger, frowned thoughtfully until his eyebrows almost obscured his eyes, then came down the scale with slow and measured pace. "Well, little lady who is never dull, and what has all this to do with _The Fairy Prince_?" "It is because I have no sisters, no friends, that--that I pretend. But you do not understand." He played some chord with both hands. "Very young people and very old ones pretend," he said, with dreamy sententiousness; "pretending is what makes them happy. But the Prince----?" She smiled deprecatingly. "When I read, monsieur, I think that the girl--there is always a girl, is there not?" He nodded gravely. "I do not think it is she," she went on, "but myself; and when the book is finished, and she marries her lover, then I am happy ... and dream...." "'We are such stuff as dreams are made of,'" he murmured, and trilled with his first and second fingers. "So, monsieur," she continued, glancing shyly at him, "in that book----" "There is a girl." "Yes. And a Fairy Prince who was very handsome." "Like me?" "It does not say, monsieur." "Ah!" "But I think so," she said earnestly, "for he was the handsomest man in all France." "It said nothing of England?" "No, monsieur, only France." He nodded with great dignity, and motioned her to proceed. She leaned forward with her elbows on the table, and rested her chin on her interlocked fingers. "To-day I was reading it to Louis," she said, "when, just at the moment that they met--_vous voilà!_--you came. Monsieur," she said naïvely, "are you a fairy prince?" He considered, with head characteristically on one side. "N-no," he said, "I cannot claim that, but----" "Ah, yes?" Her face lit up with delighted anticipation. "I am a prince of the air." He struck an attitude and held it.