et withal so dignified,
that the very chairs might have been expected to get up and walk out.

Udo imitated her as well as he could.

At about the time when Wiggs was just falling asleep, he repeated it
in his fiftieth different voice.

"I'm sorry," said Hyacinth; "perhaps it isn't so good as Father
thought it was."

"There's just one chance," said Udo. "It's possible it may have to be
said on an empty stomach. I'll try it to-morrow before breakfast."

Upstairs Wiggs was dreaming of the dancing that she had given up for
ever.

And what Belvane was doing I really don't know.

CHAPTER XV

THERE IS A LOVER WAITING FOR HYACINTH

So the next morning before breakfast Wiggs went up on to the castle
walls and wished. She looked over the meadows, and across the
peaceful stream that wandered through them, to the forest where she
had met her fairy, and she gave a little sigh. "Good-bye, dancing,"
she said; and then she held the ring up and went on bravely, "Please I
was a very good girl all yesterday, and I wish that Prince Udo may be
well again."

For a full minute there was silence. Then from the direction of Udo's
room below there came these remarkable words:

"_Take the beastly stuff away, and bring me a beefsteak and a flagon
of sack!_"

Between smiles and tears Wiggs murmured, "He _sounds_ all right. I
_am_ g--glad."

And then she could bear it no longer. She hurried down and out of the
Palace--away, away from Udo and the Princess and the Countess and all
their talk, to the cool friendly forest, there to be alone and to
think over all that she had lost.

It was very quiet in the forest. At the foot of her own favourite
tree, a veteran of many hundred summers who stood sentinel over an
open glade that dipped to a gurgling brook and climbed gently away
from it, she sat down. On the soft green yonder she might have
danced, an enchanted place, and now--never, never, never. . . .

How long had she sat there? It must have been a long time--because
the forest had been so quiet, and now it was so full of sound. The
trees were murmuring something to her, and the birds were singing it,
and the brook was trying to tell it too, but it would keep chuckling
over the very idea so that you could hardly hear what it was saying,
and there were rustlings in the grass--"Get up, get up," everything
was calling to her; "dance, dance."

She got up, a little frightened. Everything seemed so strangely
beautiful