I don't know how I dared with such a man, but I talked foolish fairy
talk to Mr. Somerled, _alias_ the Knight, this morning, and he answered
gravely in the same language. I should be doing him a great service, he
said, if I could lead him back to fairyland, because he used to know the
way, but had lost it long ago. He had given up the hope of finding it
again, and until the other day had feared that all the fairies were
dead.

"If you find fairyland, it ought to be while the heather moon shines," I
told him. "But I shan't have much time to help you look for it, because
in five days you'll be leaving me with mother, and travelling on alone.
You must search for the key to the rainbow wherever you go; because, you
know, it might be _anywhere_, and the light of the heather moon would
show it gleaming in the grass, or under a flower, or even in the middle
of the road before your eyes."

He looked at me in an odd, almost wistful way, and I couldn't look away
from him, though I wanted to, for it was as if he were reading my inmost
Me--using my eyes for windows, of which I couldn't draw the curtains.

"_You_ might find the key, if you haven't got it already," he said.
"Anyhow, I can't find it without your help, But no matter. Perhaps I
shouldn't know what to do with it if I did, now I've grown old and
disillusioned."

Then I answered, because I couldn't help it under the spell of his eyes.
"You're not old or disillusioned. You're a Knight: and knights who
rescue damsels are always young and brave."

Before I saw him, if any one had told me a person of over thirty was not
middle-aged, I should have thought it nonsense. But now I see that even
_thirty-four_ is not old. It seems exactly the right age for a man.

"If you dub me Knight, I christen you Princess," said he, laughing as if
embarrassed, yet pleased. "Because, I confess I wandered near enough to
the border last night, to think of you as a princess who'd been shut up
in a glass retort, as all really nice princesses were in my day, in
fairyland. Now the retort has been opened, though the princess believed
it to be hermetically sealed----"

"It was the knight who opened it!" I interrupted him. "But did you
_really_ go near to the border?"

"The border of fairyland."

"Oh! I meant Scotland. But, after all, to me it seems much the same
thing. Doesn't it to you?"

"I haven't thought of it so for a good many years," he said. "Yet it
might be----"

I lost the rest