‘You can get off now,’ he said, and she stepped off his back.
‘Take care,’ he said next; and she rubbed her eyes in astonishment, for she found herself on the top of a roof.
‘I told you you wouldn’t like it if you came,’ he said. ‘But you’d better look down below if you want to see anything that’s going on,’ and he gravely seated himself on her shoulder, for he seemed quite small again. So the Princess looked down, and she saw at some distance below a large fire that was blazing in a sort of courtyard, and then she saw that it was the battlements of a castle on which they were standing. Presently a horrible-looking old witch came within the glow of the fire—she was an awful old creature too, and she almost made the Princess cry out from fright. She seated herself near the fire, and began to beat the ground angrily with the handle of a broom that she carried, and every now and then muttered as she did so:
‘How awfully late he is. Why don’t he come?’ and various other complaints of his lateness.
‘But who is he?’ asked the Princess of the Owl in a whisper.
‘Wait, and you’ll see,’ said the Owl.
Just then something peculiar happened down below—a couple of men appeared suddenly. They did not seem to come from anywhere in particular, but they were there all the same. The Princess almost screamed with astonishment, but she checked herself in time by stuffing a pocket-handkerchief into her mouth, for one of the men whom she saw was the Knight of London, and the other was Magog the King of the Magi; and the Knight of London did not seem to be on bad terms with the King of the Magi.
‘You’ve come at last,’ growled the old woman, in a voice something between the squeaking of a slate-pencil on a slate and the growling of a bear with a sore head.
‘I couldn’t come any sooner, mother,’ said the Knight of London soothingly; ‘you see I had to wait for her to promise to marry me.’
‘Well, has she promised?’ said the witch.