Meantime Lent was passing away and Easter was close at hand. Maria thought she might now be satisfied with his constancy, and determined to take the step which she had good reason to believe would restore all his vigour.
Accordingly, while the cooks and scullions were all dispersed about one thing and another, she went into the kitchen and made a cake, into which she put the ring, and took it up herself to the queen-mother. It was not very easy for such a haggard old woman to obtain admission to the private apartments, but when she declared she had come about a remedy for the king, she was made welcome. Having thus obtained the ear of the queen-mother, she assured her, with many protestations, that if the king could he made to eat the whole of the cake, without giving the least piece of it to anyone, he would be immediately cured. But that if he gave away the least piece the virtue might be lost. This was lest he should thus give away the ring to anyone. The ladies waiting on the queen laughed at the old woman’s pretensions, and would have driven her away with contumely, but the queen said: ‘Nay, who knows but there may be healing in it. Experience often teaches the old remedies which science has failed to discover.’
Then she dismissed Maria with a present, and took the cake in to the king, trying to amuse him with the old woman’s story; but the king refused to be amused, and let the cake be. Only as he took no notice of what food he ate, and they gave him this cake for all his meals, he took it as he would have taken anything else that had been set before him. When he cut it, his knife struck against something hard, and when he had pulled this out, he found it was the very ring his sylphlike partner had given him the night she wore the dress woven of sunbeams.
At the sight he started like one waking from a trance.
‘How came this ring here?’ he exclaimed; and the queen-mother, who had stood by to see the effect of the remedy, replied,
‘A certain old woman, whom you befriended in the forest and told the servants to shelter in the palace, brought me the cake, saying it would prove a remedy for your melancholy, which she had prepared out of gratitude.’
‘Let her be called instantly hither,’ then said the king; and they went to fetch Maria Wood; but Maria could nowhere be found.
The king was at this announcement very nearly relapsing into his former condition; but the idea came to his mind to find something out by means of the ring itself. Therefore he summoned together all the goldsmiths, and refiners, and alchemists of his kingdom, and bid them tell him the history of the ring.
At the end of seven days’ trial the oldest of the alchemists brought it back to the king and said: