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. There were school half holidays when the sun shone as it never shone before, and we could not decide how to spend the time, and to look ahead seemed a glorious year before dark. There were the real holidays--Christmas and the Fourth and Birthdays, which didn’t seem like days of time at all, but were like fairies of time, not living in any clock. And Company-time, when we were not to go in certain rooms, or sing in the hall, and when all downstairs seemed unable to romp with us. And Vacation-time, when 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock meant nothing, and the face of the clock never warned or threatened and the hands never dragged, and Saturday no longer stood out but sank into insignificance, and the days ran like sands. All these times there were when life grew different and either let us in farther than ever before or else left us out altogether. But almost the strangest and best of these was house-cleaning time.