“It wasn’t undignified at all,” said the Lord of the Manor. “It was purely feminine.”
“The truth is,” said Audrey, “you can take a maiden all forlorn and put a crown on her head: but that doesn’t make her a Queen.”
“And a Queen,” said Christopher John, “can put off her crown and call herself over the coals and say the fairy-tale’s over and get into her car and drive out of the nursery rhyme: but that doesn’t alter the fact that she’s a fine lady. ‘She shall have music wherever she goes.’”
Perched upon the broad balustrade, her little hands folded in her lap, Audrey stared upon the flags.
“Why,” she said, “did the Lord of the Manor make the proposal he did? Surely he never thought that I should accept it.”
“There was no reason why you shouldn’t. Sundial means everything to you. I didn’t imagine you’d wire back ‘Every time,’ but I thought you’d negotiate.”
“Why not? The offer was honourable—the sort of offer that’s made by a King to a Queen.”
“Perhaps,” said Audrey slowly, “perhaps that’s why I didn’t take it. Being only a maiden all forlorn, my tastes are more simple. Besides, what makes you say that Sundial means everything to me?”
“I’d like you to know,” he said, “that, if you’d negotiated, you would have won hands down. The deeds would have been yours—with nothing to pay.”
“What makes you say that Sundial means everything to me?”
Pendragon stared into the distance with eyes that saw nothing.
“A fool finds out things,” he said, “when a fool’s in love . . . I fell in love with you. But then you know that. I loved you the moment I saw you standing there by the stile. And you were so very nice that, idiotically enough, I began to think that perhaps I meant something. It was great presumption, of course—but I did. I thought perhaps I figured in the nursery rhyme. . . . The trouble was that you were a Queen, while I—well, I wasn’t a King. . . . And then one day you came right down from your throne and kneeled at my feet—that morning, in the courtyard. . . . Well, we both know what happened then. Late as it is, my lady, I beg your pardon. But that’s by the way. The point is, it opened my eyes. It showed me that Sundial _without me_ was still Sundial, but that I _without Sundial_ was less than nothing at all—in a word, that I did _not_ figure in the nursery rhyme.”