At last, however, so pitiful was the cry of the Princess for him, that he could bear to hear it no more; but rising up from the reeds came trailing to her sadly over the water. "Ah, dear love!" she said when he was come to her, "if I had not distrusted you, you would not have deceived me: thus, for my fault we are punished." So she sorrowed, and he answered her:
"Nay, dear love, for if I had not deceived you, you would not have distrusted me. I thought I was not happy, yet I feared to tell it you." Thus they sorrowed together, both laying on themselves the blame and the burden.
Then she said to him: "Be here for me to-night, for now I must go; but then I shall return."
She went back to the palace, and told her mother of all that had happened. "And now," she said, "you who know where my happiness lies will not forbid me from following it; for my heart is again with the grey heron." And the Queen wept, but would not say her no.
So that night the Princess went and kissed her children as they slept standing up in their beds, with their funny feather-pates to one side; and then she took down her skin of feathers and put it on, and became changed once more into a grey heron. And again she went up to the two in their cots, and kissed their birdish heads saying: "They who can change at will, being but half human, they will come and visit us in the great pool by the wood, and bring back word of us here."
In the morning the Princess was gone, and the two children when they woke looked at each other and said: "Did we dream last night?"
They both answered each other, "Yes, first we dreamed that our mother came and kissed us; and we liked that. And then we dreamed that a grey heron came and kissed us, and we liked that better still!" They waved their arms up and down. "Why have we not wings?" they kept asking. All day long they did this, playing that they were birds. If a window were opened, it was with the greatest difficulty that they were kept from trying to fly through.
In the Court they were known as the "Feather-pates"; nothing could they be taught at all. When they were rebuked they would stand on one leg and sigh with their heads on one side; but no one ever saw tears come out of their birdish eyes.
Now at night they would dream that two grey herons came and stood by their bedsides, kissing them; "And where in the world," they said when they woke, "are our wings?"
One day, wandering about in the palace, they came upon the closet in which hung the two little feather coats. "O!!!" they cried, and opened hard bright eyes at each other, nodding, for now they knew what they would do. "If we told, they would be taken from us," they said; and they waited till it was night. Then they crept back and took the two little coats from their pegs, and, putting them on, were turned into two young herons.