So, transforming himself once more into a serpent, he wriggled through the earth and took up his place of observation beside the trellis. He had not been there long, when she actually came up to it, singing the same melancholy strains; and then she stopped to call, “Lucia! Orsola! Lucia! Orsola!” till the woods rang again. Then she seemed to get weary with calling, and she leant against the trellis.
“Ha! she’ll soon put her head through now,” chuckled Luxehale. And so she did, sure enough; and no sooner did her head appear on the other side than he twisted his coils round her and dragged her down under the earth.
Before she recovered herself he once more appeared as a handsome cavalier.
It was Regina, the youngest and best-conducted of the sisters.
“Let me go! let me go!” she cried, refusing to look at him.
“I thought I heard you calling for your sisters,” he replied, soothingly; “don’t you want to see them?”
“Oh, yes! tell me where they are.”
“I can’t tell you where they are,” he answered; “and if I did, it would be of no use, because you would not know the way to where they are. But if you come with me, it is possible we may be able to hear something about them some day. One thing is certain, no one else is so likely to be able to hear of them as I.”
Regina was terribly perplexed, something within her said she ought not to speak to the stranger gallant. “And yet, on the other hand, if, by going with him, I can do any thing to recover my dear sisters,” she thought, “I ought to risk something for that.”
When he saw her hesitate, he knew his affair was won; and, indeed, it required little persuasion to decide her now. As they went along he said so many soft and flattering things as to make her forget insensibly about her sisters. But when they got to the palace there were such a number of beautiful things to occupy her attention, so much to astonish her—a poor peasant maid who had never seen any of these fine things before—that she soon got habituated to her new life, and the fact of her having come for her sisters’ sake went quite out of her remembrance.