‘I’d die for you,’ said he.
‘Then I’ll tell you what. Send all your courtiers away, and take a situation as under-gardener here—I know we want one. And then every night I’ll climb down the jasmine and we’ll go out together and seek our fortune. I’m sure we shall find it.’
And they did go out. The very next night, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next. And they did not find their fortunes, but they got fonder and fonder of each other. They could not see each other’s [p175 faces, but they held hands as they went along through the dark.
And on the seventh night, as they passed by a house that showed chinks of light through its shutters, they heard a bell being rung outside for supper, a bell with a very loud and beautiful voice. But instead of saying—
‘Supper’s ready,’ as any one would have expected, the bell was saying—
Ding dong dell!
I could tell
Where you ought to go
To break the spell.
Then some one left off ringing the bell, so of course it couldn’t say any more. So the two went on. A little way down the road a cow-bell tinkled behind the wet hedge of the lane. And it said—not, ‘Here I am, quite safe,’ as a cow-bell should, but—