“Of my lover, who shut me in the tower.”
“And do you smile at that, because he locked you in the tower?”
“I am thinking of what he will say now. 'Look, look,' he will say, 'my maiden has sent me a little urn; she has not forgotten me in thirty years.'”
And time goes on...
“What, prisoner! sit you there idle, and smile?”
“I grow old, I grow old, my eyes are blind, I am only thinking.”
“Of him that you met forty years ago?”
“Of him whom I met when I was young. Maybe it was forty years ago.”
“But do you not know, then, that he is dead? ... Pale beldam, you do not answer; your lips are white, you breathe no more...”
There! That was the strange tale of the girl in the tower. Wait, Æsop, wait a little: there was something I forgot. One day she heard her lover's voice in the courtyard, and she fell on her knees and blushed. And that was when she was forty years...