of morning has come to you, my
darling!'

'I am better, dearest, better.'

'You sigh, my own.'

'No; I breathe lots, lots of salt air now, and lift like a boat. Ask
him--he had a little friend, much shorter than himself, who came the
whole way with him out of true friendship--ask him where is the friend?'

Miss Sibley turned her head to me.

'Temple,' said I; 'Temple is a midshipman; he is at sea.'

'That is something to think of,' the princess murmured, and dropped her
eyelids a moment. She resumed 'The Grand Seigneur was at Vienna last
year, and would not come to Sarkeld, though he knew I was ill.'

My father stooped low.

'The Grand Seigneur, your servant, dear princess, was an Ottoman Turk,
and his Grand Vizier advised him to send flowers in his place weekly.'

'I had them, and when we could get those flowers nowhere else,' she
replied. 'So it was you! So my friends have been about me.'

During the remainder of the walk I was on one side of the chair, and her
little maid on the other, while my father to rearward conversed with Miss
Sibley. The princess took a pleasure in telling me that this Aennchen of
hers knew me well, and had known me before ever her mistress had seen me.
Aennchen was the eldest of the two children Temple and I had eaten
breakfast with in the forester's hut. I felt myself as if in the forest
again, merely wondering at the growth of the trees, and the narrowness of
my vision in those days.

At parting, the princess said,

'Is my English improved? You smiled at it once. I will ask you when I
meet you next.'

'It is my question,' I whispered to my own ears.

She caught the words.

'Why do you say--"It is my question"?'

I was constrained to remind her of her old forms of English speech.

'You remember that? Adieu,' she said.

My father considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I crossed
the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding it, the
curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the wave-mounds, the
sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness of the water, and
the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with shore, looking
like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination of my watch and
the sun's altitude, I was able to calculate what would, in all
likelihood, have been his height above yonder waves when her chair was
turned toward the city, at a point I reached in the track. But of the
matter then simultaneously