And there was the whole matter in a nutshell!
But the Princess stamped her foot on the stone floor. “Of course I will not give you my heart,” she said. “And if you will not tell me for kindness, I will be going on, for I have nothing with which to pay you!”
“Not so fast!” cried the Wizard—for he was as wise as a rat in a library—“If you will not give me your heart, just let me have a kiss and I will call it a bargain!”
Then the Princess remembered her godmother’s three kisses, and she thought that this was the place for them, if they were ever to be used at all, although she liked the thought of kissing the Wizard about as much as she liked sour wine. She crept up to the throne, and, with her eyes tight closed, gave the Wizard the first of the three kisses.
At that the whole Black Forest shook with the force of the Magic, hissing through the trees, and the Wizard, with his Three Dragons turned into solid stone!
The crystal globe spun around in the air, humming like a hive full of bees and sank slowly to the foot of the throne.
Hardly had it touched the ground than the whole castle rent and split into a thousand pieces, and I would not like to have been there, unless I had a bit of gold thread spun out of moonlight around my finger, for the huge rocks were falling as thick as peas in a pan!
But the Princess hardly noticed the rocks at all, for, as the sun rose over the Black Forest, she recognized the marble figure of the Prince, standing among the ruins. You may be sure that she was heartbroken as she went up to him, weeping very bitterly and calling and calling on his name. Then in her sorrow she reached up and kissed the cold stone face with the second magic kiss.
Then suddenly she felt the marble grow soft and warm beneath her touch, and the Prince came back to life and took her in his arms.
When he recognized the silent figures of his gay train, he was sad as death, and the Princess wept with him. But suddenly they saw an old, old woman picking her way among the fallen stones.