Secrets don't agree with me.
I'm too big, and broad, and too much of a man, to go creeping through
the woods with a secret. I prefer to print it on a banner and ride up
the road waving it."

"Like,--'A youth who bore mid snow and ice, A banner with a strange
device,'" I said.

"That would be 'a banner with a strange device,'" laughest Laddie.
"But, yes--something like!"

"Have you told the Princess?"

"I have!" Laddie fairly shouted it.

"Docs SHE like secrets?"

"No more than I do!"

"Then why----?"

"There you go!" said Laddie. "Zeus, but the woman is beginning to
measle out all over you! You know as well as any one that there's
something wrong at her house. I don't know what it is; I can't even
make a sensible guess as yet, but it's worse than the neighbours think.
It's a thing that has driven a family from their home country, under a
name that I have doubts about being theirs, and sent them across an
ocean, 'strangers in a strange land,' as it says in the Bible. It's
something that keeps a cultured gentleman and scholar raging up and
down the roads and over the country like a madman. It shuts a
white-faced, lovely, little woman from her neighbours, but I have
passed her walking the road at night with both hands pressed against
her heart. Sometimes it tries the Princess past endurance and control;
and it has her so worn and tired struggling with it that she is willing
to carry another secret, rather than try to find strength to do
anything that would make more trouble for her father and mother."

"Would it trouble them for her to know you, Laddie?"

"So long as they don't and won't become acquainted with me, or any one,
of course it would."

"Can't you force them to know you?"

"That I can!" said Laddie. "But you see, I only met the Princess a
short time ago, and there would be no use in raising trouble, unless
she will make me her Knight!"

"But hasn't she, Laddie?"

"Not in the very littlest least," said Laddie. "For all I know, she is
merely using me to help pass a lonely hour. You see, people reared in
England have ideas of class, that two or three generations spent here
wash out. The Princess and her family are of the unwashed British.
Father's people have been here long enough to judge a man on his own
merits."

"You mean the Princess' family would think you're not good enough to be
her Knight?"

"Exactly!"

"And we know that our family thinks they are infidels, and wicked