And what a pleasure that seemed! To the dog of course, but scarcely less so to the boy. How he skimmed along over the ground--his cheeks glowing, and his hair flying, and his legs--oh, what a pair of legs he had!
Prince Dolor watched him with great intentness, and in a state of excitement almost equal to that of the runner himself--for a while. Then the sweet pale face grew a trifle paler, the lips began to quiver and the eyes to fill.
"How nice it must be to run like that!" he said softly, thinking that never--no, never in this world--would he be able to do the same.
Now he understood what his godmother had meant when she gave him his travelling-cloak, and why he had heard that sigh--he was sure it was hers--when he had asked to see "just one little boy."
"I think I had rather not look at him again," said the poor little Prince, drawing himself back into the centre of his cloak, and resuming his favourite posture, sitting like a Turk, with his arms wrapped round his feeble, useless legs.
"You're no good to me," he said, patting them mournfully. "You never will be any good to me. I wonder why I had you at all; I wonder why I was born at all, since I was not to grow up like other little boys. _Why_ not?"
A question, so strange, so sad, yet so often occurring in some form or other, in this world--as you will find, my children, when you are older--that even if he had put it to his mother she could only have answered it, as we have to answer many as difficult things, by simply saying, "I don't know." There is much that we do not know, and cannot understand--we big folks, no more than you little ones. We have to accept it all just as you have to accept anything which your parents may tell you, even though you don't as yet see the reason of it. You may some time if you do exactly as they tell you, and are content to wait.
Prince Dolor sat a good while thus, or it appeared to him a good while, so many thoughts came and went through his poor young mind--thoughts of great bitterness, which, little though he was, seemed to make him grow years older in a few minutes.
Then he fancied the cloak began to rock gently to and fro, with a soothing kind of motion, as if he were in somebody's arms: somebody who did not speak, but loved him and comforted him without need of words; not by deceiving him with false encouragement or hope, but by making him see the plain hard truth, in all its hardness, and thus letting him quietly face it, till it grew softened down, and did not seem nearly so dreadful after all.