He stammered a request for soap--scented soap. He wished himself tens of ten miles away, or time out of mind dead, when--wonderful! The maiden in the window looked frankly over her shoulder. Was it that her eyes brimmed with friendly laughter, or did it seem so to him because his head had become incapable of a true notion? His heart, so to speak, found its feet; he made a muddle of every sentence he launched upon, but his words had a voice behind them. So much he contrived to convey: he was very hard to please in the matter of soap. He sniffed at a variety of proffered tablets, whose virtues Madame Finibald, in very truth like a witch with a philter to sell, assiduously set forth; each cake he examined seemed to hold in her estimation just a little higher place than the foregoing. At the end of ten minutes, without positively losing her good-humor, she declared that he had seen all in the shop, she was sorry and surprised they could not suit him, they might have a fresh stock in on the morrow. He was leaving in clumsy embarrassment, empty handed, with a promise to return, when the princess lightly jumped from the window-place, and, sweeping the hair off her face, said: "There is one more sort, ma'am. I saw it up there, high, when I dusted. Let me get it." She fetched the steps, and in a moment had climbed and lifted down a box. She set it on the counter; she opened it herself and held towards him, with a direct glance, a packet with a red rose printed on the wrapper. Madame Finibald, with an exclamation, snatched it from the girl's hand, and began, as if here had been a little grandchild recovered to her old age, to speak with tenderness of its merits. The girl stood near, twining and untwining a lock around her finger, while she unaffectedly looked at the customer. Her hair came below her knees; every moment she had to toss it back out of her face. "Go back to your window, wicked child!" cried the old witch, suddenly, as if catching at a piece of gold as it was being taken out of her pocket. "Go back!" "I am tired of sitting!" said the little princess, twisting her shoulders in her frock with the prettiest peevishness. "I have sat and sat and sat! I have finished my story. Let me go out and get a bun. You know you said I could when it was noon." She caught at her hair, and, to the infinite wonder of one looking on, began twisting, twisting, twisting, coiling, coiling, coiling, driving in great skewers--while he filled his blissful pockets with rose-scented soap. The bell snapped in fretful reprehension for her passing out. Less than a minute after, it exclaimed in annoyed surprise for his.