But it was like the court of the Sleeping Beauty--no one
came or called.
At length, wandering on, she came upon a gardener in a neat gray
livery, clipping with a large, distorted pair of scissors the velvet
edge of a flower-bed. He resembled so undeniably the gardeners in
that ageless chronicle of Alice that Caroline smiled approvingly
upon him.
"You are one of my gardeners, I suppose," she said regally.
"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.
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