Æsop snapped at her, sharply: "Do as you are told. You are not a princess
yet."
The girl frowned, the girl's eyes flashed, but her acquaintance with Æsop
had given her the thoroughly justifiable impression that he was a man
whom it was better to obey, and she retired into the caravan and shut the
green-and-red door with a bang behind her.
Æsop turned with a questioning grin to Peyrolles. "Well?" he said.
Peyrolles looked approval. "I think she'll do. I'll go and find the
prince at once."
"I will go a little way with you," Æsop said, more perhaps because he
thought his company might exasperate the sham grand man than for any
other reason. He knew Peyrolles would think it unbecoming his dignity to
be seen in close companionship with the shabbily habited hunchback, hence
his display of friendship. As he linked his black arm in the yellow-satin
arm of Peyrolles, he added: "I have taken every care to make our tale
seem plausible. The gypsies will swear that they stole her seventeen
years ago."
Peyrolles nodded, looking askance at him, and wishing that destiny had
not compelled him to make use of such an over-familiar agent, and the
precious pair went over the bridge together and disappeared from the
neighborhood of the little Inn, and the spirit of solitude seemed again
to brood over the locality. But it was not suffered to brood for very
long. As soon as the voices and the footsteps of Peyrolles and Æsop were
no longer audible; the green-and-red door of the caravan was again
cautiously opened, and cautiously the head of the pretty gypsy girl was
thrust out into the air. When she saw that the pair had disappeared, she
ran lightly down the steps of the caravan, and, crossing the common,
paused under the windows of the Inn, where she began to sing in a sweet,
rich voice a verse of a Spanish gypsy song:
"Come to the window, dear;
Listen and lean while I say
A Romany word in your ear,
And whistle your heart away."