Every day the rabbit came and every day there was a ring missing. The princess had a large box full of rings, in the beginning, but one morning she opened the box and saw that it was entirely empty. She remembered then that she had put on her last ring, one set with a sapphire, the morning before.
The princess became so sad that she would not go out to the balcony to play with the white rabbit. Every day she grew sadder and sadder. At last her father, the king, noticed it.
"What is the matter with our daughter, the princess?" he asked the queen. "She is sad now, and once she was the very jolliest, happiest princess in the whole world."
"I cannot imagine what the trouble is," replied the queen. "Perhaps she is lonely. Let us send for the storytellers of the kingdom to come and tell their stories to entertain her."
Accordingly, the king sent for all the storytellers in the whole kingdom. All the storytellers had to come to the palace even if they were old and lame.
Now it so happened that in the kingdom there were two old women who were very lame. They knew the most interesting stories of anybody, but it took them so long to reach the palace that they forgot all their best stories on the way.
"What story are you going to tell the princess?" one of the lame old women asked the other.
"I can't remember a single one of my stories," said the other old woman. "It has taken my lame old legs so long to travel the road to the palace that now that we are almost there I can't think of a single story."
The two old women tried to remember some of their stories, but they could not think of any. They were almost at the royal palace, too.
"What shall we do if we can't remember our stories?" asked the first old woman.