"Oh, yes, he turned into a black cat," cried Eileen.
"Who turned into a black cat?" asked her father.
"The knight did," sobbed Eileen.
And then the poor old father went out of the room, thinking that his daughter was going mad.
"She is quite beside herself; she says that you are not a man, but a cat," he said sorrowfully to the young knight, whom he met standing outside his daughter's room. "What in the world could have put such thoughts into her head? Not a thing will she talk about but black cats."
"Let me see her; I will bring her to her right mind," said the knight.
"I doubt it very much," replied the chief; but as he did not know what else to do, he let him go into the room, and the knight went in softly and closed the door, and went up to the couch on which Eileen lay. She lay with her eyes closed, and with all her gold chains still upon her neck and arms; and the knight, because he trod softly, had come quite up to her side before she knew that he was there. But the moment she opened her eyes and saw him, she gave such a scream that it quite made
him leap; and if he had not bolted the door every creature in the castle would have rushed into the room at the sound of it. Fortunately for him, however, he had bolted the door; and as it was a very stout door, made of strong oak, Eileen might have screamed for an hour before anybody could have burst it open. As soon, therefore, as the knight had recovered from the start she gave him, he quietly took a chair and sat down by her side.
"Eileen," he said, beginning to speak at once—for probably he felt that the matter he had come to mention was rather a painful and a delicate one, and the more quickly he could get over what he had to say the better—"Eileen, you have unhappily to-day seen me under—ahem!—under an unaccustomed shape——"
He had only got so far as this, when Eileen gave another shriek and covered her face with her hands.