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Her eyes softened; her sympathy deepened to compassion. "She must certainly put me down as the most complacent egotist in two hemispheres, so to regale her with unsolicited information about myself," thought John; "but surely it would need six hemispheres to produce another pair of eyes as beautiful as hers." "Yes," he said, "I should be 'looking up' if I asked even a beggar-maid to marry me."
Is not King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid an adjudged case in point? 'Professional! professional! another forfeit, exclaimed the tumultuary nobility.
Her emotion almost overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled against it bravely, and came to the sofa on which he lay and dropped upon her knees by his side. The beggar-maid who was wooed by a king could have felt no deeper sense of her lover's condescension than that which filled the heart of this poor simple girl as she knelt by her mother's gentleman lodger.
'When you come back, you will perhaps bring a bride with you, said the Queen. 'If she be a great lady, or if she be only a beggar-maid, I will dress her in beautiful robes, and she shall stand among the fairest ladies of my court. 'In three days I shall come back, if I am not slain in battle with the knight, said Geraint.
"Why have you followed me?" he asked. "To pick up the ball, should you drop it." "The ball is drowned," he said. "Why did you put it in the water?" she asked. "Because you touched it," he replied. She was very sad then. "You scorn to touch what a beggar-maid has handled?" she asked. To this he made no reply, but strolled away into the green wood, while wearily she turned back.
This course had been well enough during the period of a high-bred courtship, almost too fastidiously disdainful of the commonplace; but now that the Fairy Princess had become a beggar-maid, while Prince Charming was Prince Charming still, it was natural that the former should recognize its insufficiency.
She replied, "Let me remain in your court three days as a beggar-maid. If at the end of that time you are not sure, turn me out. I, too, will be sure of something at the end of three days." "Of what will you be sure?" asked the King. "Which of you is the real king here." Then King Cuthbert grew red like old leather, and laughed and sighed and frowned.
She pointed to incidents of their youth; her vision was acutely retrospective. The wealth of her nephew and niece caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past endurance. She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry a beggar-maid. As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare poet.
Then, on the other side, there is the reminder and exhortation: 'He is thy Lord, worship thou Him. The beggar-maid that, in the old ballad, married the king, in all her love was filled with reverence; and the ragged, filthy souls, whom Jesus Christ stoops to love, and wash, and make His own, are never to forget, in the highest rapture of their joy, their lowly adoration, nor in the glad familiarity of their loving approach to Him, cease to remember that the test of love is, 'Keep My commandments.
She laughed as she read the sudden disappointment written on Paul's face. "You remember the old tale of the knight whose kiss transformed the beggar-maid into a king's daughter? Some such method I would suggest, perhaps." "But I've tried that already!" Paul almost said. But he caught himself in the nick of time. "How can I ever thank you enough?" he said as he rose to go.
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