But when the prince came to the sixth lady he found her, to his great astonishment, sitting at the bottom of the ditch, laughing.
Her hat had come off, her hair had come down, she was bedaubed with mud from head to foot, and her poor little hands were covered with nettle stings.
But she laughed all the same.
“We must have looked so funny all tumbling into the ditch,” she said. “I wish I could have seen it. We’re still rather a funny sight, aren’t we?”—and she looked down at herself and up at the weeping ladies on the bank, and laughed again.
There was so much mud on her face that the prince could not see what she really looked like, but he remembered the words of his aunt.
“What is the name of the sixth lady?” he asked, when they had all been bundled off home. “The one who laughed?”
“Her name is Mellidora,” he was told.
So in the evening he sought out Mellidora and found that she was a most beautiful and charming person, so much so that he lost his heart to her forthwith.
“But I must do nothing in a hurry,” he said to himself. “After all, there is the other half of my aunt’s counsel to be considered. In any case, it would perhaps seem a little strange if I asked her to marry me quite so soon. We will see what happens to-morrow.”