Page:Margaret sherwood--The Princess Pourquoi.djvu/96

 of arch and gable. Women sobbed for very joy; others wrote madly on their tablets; maidens gasped with red lips slightly opened; never, during the whole lecture season, had come so big a wind from out the bags, and honest Hugh blushed with mingled shame and triumph when he saw the face of his betrothed, for it wore the look of one who had seen the white vision of naked truth.

Following the fashion of the Necromancer, he had taken a maxim, and had dressed it up so that men knew it not, and so that it came forth as revelation. All that he had said from the first to the last was the truth that he knew best: "Honesty is the best policy;" but this was the way in which he had said it, with constantly shifting color: