“Suso, stand thus with your arm about my waist so that your father may see us together. Thus he will think that I love you.” Then she hissed in the girl’s ear: “But I hate you, hate you, hate you.”
And the owl lifted his head, blew a little and repeated softly: “Hate you—Hoo!—Hoo!”
From far off in the woods came the sound of an answering owl like an echo: “Hate you—Hoo!—Hoo!” and it seemed to Suso that all the world hated her for no cause, for the screeching parrots, too, repeated the cry. As for the sweet feathered things that she loved, they had all fled from that place.
Soon the stepmother spoke again and the owl dropped to a lower branch the better to hear. “Suso,” said the woman, “your father cannot live much longer. The spell is upon him and day by day he nears his death. Because of that I am glad, for when he dies, all this land, the house, and all its riches, must be mine.”
Hearing that vicious speech Suso was well nigh faint with fear and horror and would have sped to her father to warn him. But the woman caught her by the wrist, twisting it painfully, and pinched the soft place on her arm with her other hand, and stooping again so that it seemed to the watching father that she kissed Suso, she said:
“But see to it that you say no word, for the moment that you say anything but good of me, that moment your father will fall dead.”
So what was Suso to do?
Thus it was that Suso crept to quiet places and told her tale to the whispering leaves and to the evening breeze, and thus it was that in the midst of all that beauty of golden sunlight and silver-glinted waters and flower-twined forest she could not but be sad. For there were tears in her heart, and everything that her father did for her was as nothing and like a crumbling tower.
But she had told the trees (and trees bend their tops though they are foot-fast, and leaves, too, whisper one to another), so that the tale went abroad, though of this, Suso knew nothing.