"Time hasn't exactly stood still with you, you know, Beauty."
"Yet you saw me every day, and went on loving me."
"Well,—er——" He shuffled his feet and looked away.
"Didn't you?"
"Well, you see—of course I wanted to get back, you see—and as long as you—I mean if we—if you thought we were in love with each other, then, of course, you were ready to help me. And so——"
"You're quite old and bald. I can't think why I didn't notice it before."
"Well, you wouldn't when I was a tortoise," said Udo pleasantly. "As tortoises go I was really quite a youngster. Besides, anyhow one never notices baldness in a tortoise."
"I think," said Beauty, weighing her words carefully, "I think you've gone off a good deal in looks the last day or two."
Charming was home in time for dinner, and the next morning he was more popular than ever outside his family as he rode through the streets of the city. But Blunderbus lay dead in his Castle. You and I know that he was killed by the magic sword; yet somehow a strange legend grew up around his death. And ever afterwards in that country, when one man told his neighbour a more than ordinarily humorous anecdote, the latter would cry, in between the gusts of merriment, "Don't! You'll make me die of laughter!" And then he would pull himself together, and add with a sigh, "Like Blunderbus."