He was summoned at once to the royal presence, shivering and blue with cold; but his romantic heart throbbed at the sight of so much beauty, and his face assumed a warmer hue. He was so intoxicated with delight that afterwards he could never quite tell how it all came about. As in a haze, he remembered the Princess greeting him as the one long awaited; he recollected her saying that as he could wrest the stars from the selfish skies, he could gratify her desire to wear some in her hair, and bade him go collect them.
He explained his invention. She grew impatient. He told her the electricity would kill him. She shrugged her shoulders and insisted. He declined to take the risk. Whereupon she turned into a fury in her pretty illogicality, and exclaiming that he must be the wrong man after all, she flung his invention into the fire and ordered him to be flung after it. He took the hint by the heels and fled through the window, far into the night.
Not at all Content with his romantic adventure, or with life as a whole, he enlisted and became a target in the front rank of the army.
It was, of course, some time later that the eldest brother—who had been plucked from the billows by a fisherman who happened to be passing by as usual—booked his passage home, and found on his arrival that the said home had been sold, as advertised, for building lots in eligible plots on easy terms, to pay expenses.
The second brother, in order to secure his freedom from prison, then and there smashed up his automaton and trudged home, arriving just in time to join his brother in being ordered away from their former doorstep, though still held responsible for the rates and taxes.
At that moment, too, the brother of the twain was deposited amongst them, having been invalided to his sold-up home for life.
So, in order not to trespass for fear of prosecution, they all three sat down a little outside the boundary line and recounted each to the others their adventures and their experiences. It was nightfall before they had done, and they really could hardly help laughing. And then, after thinking things out, they shook hands all round in silence.
For the prophecy had come true. They were content. The three sons were now thoroughly Content—to work no more, to do nothing more for the rest of their existence. It wasn't worth it, they said. Their disappointments were over, and they were fully Content that they should be so. The villagers, once more open-mouthed in their gaping, and open-minded too, differed from the inhabitants of the great city, and looked upon the brothers as who should say "three wise men," and took upon themselves the care of them in the workhouse, and were proud to get them, and to show them to visitors.
As to the beautiful Princess, she was changed by time into an old maid, and still kept on turning up her nose at elderly, rheumatic suitors as they passed on their usual rounds.
So the old father was right after all.