e! I had seen her only a few times, but this was the
Pryor girl, just as sure as I would have known if it had been Sally.
What dazed me was that she answered in every particular the description
Laddie had given me of the Queen's daughter. And worst of all, from
the day she first came among us, moving so proud and cold, blabbing old
Hannah Dover said she carried herself like a Princess--as if Hannah
Dover knew HOW a Princess carried herself!--every living soul, my
father even, had called her the Princess. At first it was because she
was like they thought a Princess would be, but later they did it in
meanness, to make fun. After they knew her name, they were used to
calling her the Princess, so they kept it up, but some of them were
secretly proud of her; because she could look, and do, and be what they
would have given anything to, and knew they couldn't to save them.

I was never in such a fix in all my life. She looked more as Laddie
had said the Princess would than you would have thought any woman
could, but she was Pamela Pryor, nevertheless. Every one called her
the Princess, but she couldn't make reality out of that. She just
couldn't be the Fairy Queen's daughter; so the letter couldn't possibly
be for her.

She had no business in our woods; you could see that they had plenty of
their own. She went straight to the door of the willow room and walked
in as if she belonged there. What if she found the hollow and took
Laddie's letter! Fast as I could slip over the leaves, I went back.
She was on the moss carpet, on her knees, and the letter was in her
fingers. It's a good thing to have your manners soundly thrashed into
you. You've got to be scared stiff before you forget them. I wasn't
so afraid of her as I would have been if I had known she WAS the
princess, and have Laddies letter, she should not. What had the kind
of girl she was, from a home like hers, to teach any one from our house
about making sunshine? I was at the willow wall by that time peering
through, so I just parted it a little and said: "Please put back that
letter where you got it. It isn't for you."

She knelt on the mosses, the letter in her hand, and her face, as she
turned to me, was rather startled; but when she saw me she laughed, and
said in the sweetest voice I ever heard: "Are you so very sure of
that?"

"Well I ought to be," I said. "I put it there."

"Might I inquire for whom you put it there?"

"No ma'am! That's