The scenery had been changed with little delay between acts.  Three tall screens, hastily unfolded just in front of the spiked fence, hid the orchard from view, and a fourth screen served the double purpose of forming the side wall of the room, and hiding the ogre’s tower.  The narrow space between the screens and the footlights was ample for the scene that took place there, and the arrangement saved much trouble.  For in the last act, the screens had only to be carried away, to leave the stage with its original setting.

“Lloyd never looked so pretty before, in her life,” said Mr. Sherman to his wife, as they watched the Princess Winsome tread back and forth beside the spinning-wheel, the golden cord held lightly in her white fingers.  But she was even prettier in the next scene, when with the dove in her hands she stood at the window, twining the slender gold chain about its neck and singing in a high, sweet voice, clear as a crystal bell: 

    “Flutter and fly, flutter and fly,
     Bear him my heart of gold. 
     Bid him be brave, little carrier dove,
     Bid him be brave and bold.”

Twice many hands called her back, and many eyes looked admiringly as she sang the song again, holding the dove to her breast and smoothing its white feathers as she repeated the words: 

    “Tell him that I at my spinning-wheel
     Will sing while it turns and hums,
     And think all day of his love so leal
     Until with the flute he comes.”

“Jack,” said some one in a low tone to Mr. Sherman, as the applause died away for the third time, “Jack, when the Princess Winsome is a little older, you’d be wise to call in the ogre’s help.  You’ll have more than one Kentucky Knight trying to carry her away if you don’t.”

Mr. Sherman made some laughing reply, but turned away so absorbed by a thought that his friend’s words had suggested that he lost all of the flower messengers’ speeches.  That some knight might want to carry off his little Princess Winsome was a thought that had never occurred to him except as some remote possibility far in the future.  But looking at her as she stood in her long court train, he realised that in a few more months she would be in her teens, and then—­time goes so fast!  He sighed, thinking with a heavy sinking of the heart that it might be only a few years until she would be counting the daisy petals in earnest.

The curtain hitched just at the last, so that it would not go down, so with their rainbow bubbles bright the fairies ran off the stage toward various points in the audience, for the coveted admiration and praise which they knew was their due.

“Wasn’t Hero fine?  Didn’t he do his part beautifully?” cried Lloyd, as her father, with one long step, raised himself up to a place beside her on the stage, where the children were holding an informal reception.

“Show him the money-box,” cried Keith, pressing down through the crowds from the outer door whither he had gone after the entrance receipts.