“How could you love such an ugly, ill-tempered, rude, hateful little wretch?”
“I saw, through it all, what you were going to be,” said the wise woman, kissing her. “But remember you have yet only begun to be what I saw.”
“I will try to remember,” said the princess, holding her cloak, and looking up in her face.
“Go, then,” said the wise woman.
Rosamond turned away on the instant, ran to the picture, stepped over the frame of it, heard a door close gently, gave one glance back, saw behind her the loveliest palace-front of alabaster, gleaming in the pale-yellow light of an early summer-morning, looked again to the eastward, saw the faint outline of her father’s city against the sky, and ran off to reach it.
It looked much further off now than when it seemed a picture, but the sun was not yet up, and she had the whole of a summer day before her.