"What!" exclaimed the Princess; "you have promised to marry a witch's daughter? Do you mean to say that all this while I have been playing with somebody else's Prince?"
There was no doubt that the Princess Gentianella was extremely angry; and the Prince could not help thinking that she was just a little bit unreasonable as well.
"You see, it was part of the disenchantment," he explained. "If you had to be invisible all your life, you would promise anything to get disenchanted. Besides," he added, as the Princess showed no signs of being appeased, "they told me that Anemone, although a witch's daughter, was exceedingly beautiful."
"What difference does that make?" demanded the Princess. "You ought to have told me before, that you were somebody else's Prince. You haven't been playing fair!"
"It is true I forgot to mention it," said the Prince, a little crossly; "but one cannot remember everything, you know."
Princess Gentianella gathered up her train with much dignity and turned her back on the Prince.
"People who are as forgetful as that deserve to be invisible," she observed haughtily; and with that she swept up the garden path and into the palace. She lost all her dignity, however, as soon as she was out of the Prince's sight; and it was a very doleful little Princess who came to take tea with her royal parents that afternoon. When she even went so far as to say that she preferred bread-and-butter to plum-cake, the King and Queen began to be seriously alarmed.
"What is the matter with the child?" asked the Queen of the King.
"Perhaps she has a sunstroke," suggested the King, who thought that only illness could possibly prevent a daughter of his from eating her plum-cake at tea-time. The Queen knew better, but she waited until the King had gone back into his study before she said anything. Then she said the very best thing possible.
"What did you see when you looked over your wall, little daughter?" she asked.