"Come, come, my love," said the King, "what is the matter with you? Surely you are not thinking of that foolish old prophecy!"

"How can I help thinking about it?" the Queen answered. "I have not been able to get it out of my mind for fifteen years, and now that the day has come I am afraid."


"Make your mind easy," said the King. "Nothing is going to happen. Why, there's not a spinning-wheel within a hundred miles. I have taken good care of that!" And he went away chuckling, to attend a meeting of his Cabinet. But the Queen shook her head. Now while the King and Queen were talking, the Princess Briar-Rose was wandering about in the castle, visiting room after room, as she had done many times before. The castle was so big that a stranger might easily have been lost in its maze of stairways and corridors, but Briar-Rose knew every part of it quite well, from the great kitchens below ground, where on feast days a score of cooks prepared the dinner for hundreds of guests, to the topmost turret above the battlements, where the sentries kept watch with their pikes on their shoulders. There was only one part of the castle which Briar-Rose had never explored, and that was an ancient tower which rose from the eastern end. The door of that tower was always locked, and although the Princess had often tried to find the key she had never succeeded. The servants told her that the tower had not been inhabited for nearly a hundred years, and it had never been entered within the memory of anybody in the castle.

To-day Briar-Rose flitted restlessly from place to place. She peeped into the kitchen and saw the kitchen boys turning the spits on which whole oxen were being roasted. Then she went into the empty throne room and saw the golden thrones side by side upon the dais, and the rich tapestry, glowing with all the colours of the rainbow, on the walls. After that she mounted to the battlements from which she could see over miles and miles of her father's kingdom, and not content with that, she ran up the staircases into the turrets and looked through their narrow slits of windows upon the courtyard below, so far down that the people walking therein seemed no bigger than mice. And then she came down again and continued her wanderings, searching in all sorts of out-of-the-way corners, until at last she found herself before the door of the ancient tower into which she had never been. And as she looked at the door, she gave a start of surprise and then a cry of joy.

There was a key in the lock.

CHAPTER VIII