Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/191

THE SOUND OF A TRUMPET in the feeling that these were fine doings for Sophy Grouch, of Morpingham in Essex! "Fancy me! is the indefensibly primitive form in which this delight shows in one of the few letters bearing date from the Castle of Praslok.

Yet it is possible to find this simple, gracious surprise at Fortune's fancies worthy of love. Her own courage, her own catching at Fortune's forelock, seem to have been always unconscious and instinctive. These she never hints at, nor even begins to analyze. Of her love for the Prince she speaks once or twice—and once in reference to what she had felt for Casimir. "I loved him most when he left me, and when he died," she writes. "I love him not less now because I love Monseigneur. But I can love Monseigneur more for having loved Casimir. God bade the dear dead die, but He bade me live, and death helped to teach me how to do it." Again she reflects: "How wonderfully everything is worth while even sorrows!" Following which reflection, in the very next line (she is writing to Julia Robins), comes the na'ive outburst: "I look just splendid in my sheepskin tunic and he's given me the sweetest toy of a revolver; that's in case they ever charge, and try and cut us up behind our guns!" She is laughing at herself, but the laugh is charged with an infectious enjoyment. So she lived, loved, and laughed through those unequalled days, trying to soothe Marie Zerkovitch, bantering Max von Hollbrandt, giving her masculine mind and her feminine soul wholly to her Prince. "She was like a singularly able and energetic sunbeam," Max says quaintly, himself obviously not untouched by her attractions. The Prince's mind was simple. He was quite sincere about his guns; he had no wish to go on his