Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/263

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"Yes, Miss," he replied, respectfully, touching his banded cap, "I am that."

"You garden very well," said Marie Antoinette, dizzy with delight at his manner.

"Yes, Miss; thank you, Miss, I'm sure," and the cap came off.

She walked on superbly. At last it had happened, and she, Caroline in the flesh, had fought her way through the prickly hedge of every-day appearance and won into the garden of romance, where dreams were true and anything might happen.

At that moment there came to meet her from behind a great beech tree a slender little lady. She had gray hair puffed daintily and fancifully about her small, pale face, and knots of pale blue ribbon, woven in and out of her lacy, trailing gown, repeated the color of her mild, round eyes. Half consciously Caroline muttered: "Here is one of my ladies-in-waiting," when the little lady rushed at her, smiling delightedly.

"Are you a queen, then?" she cried in a high, sweet voice. "How very pleasant. Dear me, how very pleasant!"