I have lost my gold,
I have lost belief.
Ah, by cruel Fate
We are onward led;
I have learned to hate,
And my faith is dead.”
Lanis certainly should not have sung so bitterly when such a beautiful world bloomed around him; after all, being deceived by one man does not mean that every one else is as cruel; but then Lanis was very sensitive, and the unjust way in which he had been treated made him very sad, so that all his songs now spoke but of the sorrows of life and the sadness of despair.
As he wandered on for many months in this dismal mood, he met with many adventures, but, alas! nothing which could give him back his former childlike belief in human kindness, and he was very anxious to get to the Kingdom of Shadows and find once more his lost happiness.
Once he came to a great city which was the capital of a very rich kingdom, and here found the citizens in a state of great dismay, for their King, whom every one loved, had gone out of his mind. No one could cure him of his madness, so it had been proclaimed that whomsoever should do so would become the husband of the lovely Princess Iris, who was the King’s daughter. Lanis saw the Princess, and she was so beautiful that he at once fell deeply in love with her, and, forgetting all his former experience of ingratitude, he thought that if he cured her father, she would grow to love him, and he would thus discover his happiness without looking any more for the Kingdom of Shadows.
