“And then, after you went into the rock?” Eva asked, eagerly. “Remember, I know nothing of that.”
Then Aster told her how, in the crevice of the rock, he had found that the Green Frog lay in wait for him. How she and her servants had taken him, bound and tied with the same spider’s web from which Eva had, once before, in the forest, released him, to her hut in the field of mud. And how, when there, he had to lie in the mud, as a footstool for the Frog,—and that every night she made him stand before her, and would laugh at him, and ask him why Eva and his friends did not come to help him.
“I was too proud,” Aster said, “and too angry, to call for you. I thought I should, by myself, be able to escape. I tried, but the power of THEY who kept me was too great for me, and I never once succeeded even in passing the strange fence around the hut.
“But all the time, Eva, I knew—and it was part of my punishment—that an appeal to you could be heard, and that you would come to help me. But that I—I, a prince,—powerful at home, and only weak now because I had lost such a trifling thing as a flower, should be compelled to ask help of one who was able to help me only because she was gentler and kinder than I was,—I could not do it. Meantime, the Green Frog laughed at my efforts to escape. Yet, do what she would to me, I never called for you. She might hang me up in the spider’s web,—she might threaten to crush me,—I was silent.
“At last I could stand it no longer, I must help to carry heavy stones, and when their weight nearly crushed me,—for though only shadows to you, they were realities to me,—I would have rested, the spider would sting me and scorch me with his poisonous breath,—the jackdaw peck me,—and the Green Frog would threaten to swallow me, and tell me that now you never would come to me, for the Dawn Fairies had made you forget me. And not till then, when they told me you had forgotten me, did I speak; and the only words that I said were these, ‘Eva! Eva! help me!’”
“Yes,” Eva said, “those are the same words that the brook brought me.” And then she told Aster about her dream: how the faces had asked why he lost his flower; and the frog had spoken of his coat; and the spider asked why he crept into the rock; and how, between it all, had come the wailing cry of “Eva! Eva! help me!”
Then, too, Aster told her how they had spoken of what she must do, and that they thought she never would do it, or know what was to be done. And then he went on:
“But at last the Green Frog grew angry, when she found that, no matter what she said or did, I only answered, ‘Eva! Eva! help me!’ For then, making her servants strip off my coat, she touched me with a stick, and said to me:
“‘You shall never let Eva hear you. I will silence you.’
“And, as she spoke, I was changed all at once into the little green bird in whose shape you found me. And then the Frog, putting me in a cage, said: