Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 9, 1895 - Romances Volume II

PRINCESS CINDERELLA
shelter of the night, the thrilling and joyous changes
of the dawn, were over ; and now, in the hot eye of
the day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly
about her. Some way off among the lower woods
a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the
gold and blue. There, surely enough, were human
folk, the hearth-surrounders. Man's fingers had laid
the twigs ; it was man's breath that had quickened
and encouraged the baby flames ; and now, as the
fire caught, it would be playing ruddily on the face
of its creator. At the thought, she felt a-cold and
little and lost in that great out-of-doors. The
electric shock of the young sunbeams and the un-
human beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt
her. The covert of the house, the decent privacy of
rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that denotes
or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw
her as with cords. The pillar of smoke was now
risen into some stream of moving air ; it began to
lean out sideways in a pennon ; and thereupon, as
though the change had been a summons, Seraphina
plunged once more into the labyrinth of the wood.
She left day upon the high ground. In the lower
groves there still lingered the blue early twilight and
the seizing freshness of the dew. But here and
there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great
outspread pine was already glorious with day ; and
here and there, through the breaches of the hills, the
sunbeams made a great and luminous entry. Here
Seraphina hastened along forest paths. She had lost
sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way,
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