“I can, I often do.”  The possibility had only just occurred to him.  He saw it as a distinction and made the most of it.  “Course if you’re going to make a fuss——­”

Tara’s eyes opened wider still.  “Oh, Roy, you are——!  ’Tisn’t me that’s making fusses.”

Though Roy knew nothing as yet about woman and the last word, he instinctively took refuge in the masculine dignity that spurns descent to the dusty arena when it feels defeat in the air.

“Girls don’t never fuss—­do they?” he queried suavely.  “Let’s get on with the Game and not bother about your Boy-of-ten.”

“And a half,” Tara insisted tactlessly, with her sweetest smile.  But when Roy chose to be impassive pin-pricks were thrown away on him.

“Where’d we stop?” he mused, ignoring her remark.  “Oh—­I know.  The Knight was going forth to quest the Elephant with golden tusks for the High Tower Princess who wanted them in her crown.  Why do Princesses always want what the knights can’t find?”

Tara’s feminine intuition leaped at a solution.

“I ’spec it’s just to show off they are Princesses and to keep the Knights from bothering round.—­So away he went and the Princess climbed up to her highest tower and waved her lily hand——­”

In the same breath she, Tara, sprang to her feet and swung herself astride a downward sweeping branch just above Roy’s head.  There she perched like a slim blue flower, dangling her tan-stockinged legs and shaking her hair at him like golden rain.  She was in one of her impish moods; reaction, perhaps,—­though she knew it not—­from the high tragedy of that other Tara, her namesake, and the great greatest-possible grandmother of her adored ‘Aunt Lila.’  Suddenly a fresh impulse seized her.  Clutching her bough, she leaned down and lightly ruffled his hair.

He started and looked reproachful.  “Don’t rumple me.  I’m going.”

“You needn’t, if you don’t want to,” she cooed caressingly. “I’m going to the tipmost top to see out over the world.  And the Princess doesn’t care a bean about the Golden Tusks—­truly.”

“She’s jolly pleased with the knight that finds them,” said Roy with a deeper wisdom than he knew.  “And you can’t be stopped off quests that way.  Come on, Prince.”

At a bend in the mossy path, he looked back and she waved her lily hand.

* * * * *

To be alone in the deep of the wood in bluebell time was, for Roy, a sensation by itself.  In a moment, you stepped through some unseen door straight into fairy-land—­or was it a looking-glass world?  For here the sky lay all around your feet in a shimmer of bluebells:  and high overhead were domes of cool green light, where the sun came flickering and filtering through millions of leaves.  Always, as far as he could remember, the magical feeling had been there.  But this morning it came over him in a queer way.  This morning—­though he could not quite make it out—­there was the Roy that felt and the Roy that knew he felt, just as there had suddenly been when he was watching his mother’s face.  And this magical world was his kingdom.  In some far-off time, it would all be his very own.  That uplifting thought eclipsed every other....