But when they had gone a bit of the way, the White Bear asked if all hadn’t happened as he had said.
“Well, she couldn’t say it hadn’t.”
“Now, mind,” said he, “if you have listened to your mother’s advice, you have brought bad luck on us both, and then all that has passed between us will be as nothing.”
“No,” she said, “she hadn’t listened to her mother’s advice.”
So when she had reached home, and had gone to bed, it was the old story over again. There came a man and lay down beside her; but at dead of night, when she heard he slept, she got up and struck a light, lit the candle, and let the light shine on him, and so she saw that he was the loveliest Prince one ever set eyes on, and she fell so deep in love with him, on the spot, that she thought she couldn’t live if she didn’t give him a kiss there and then. And so she did, but as she kissed him she dropped three hot drops of tallow on his shirt, and he woke up.
“What have you done?” he cried; “now you have made us both unlucky, for had you held out only this one year, I had been freed. For I have a stepmother who has bewitched me, so that I am a White Bear by day and a man by night. But now all ties are snapped between us, now I must set off from you to her. She lives in a castle which stands EAST O’ THE SUN AND WEST O’ THE MOON, and there, too, is a Princess, with a nose three ells long, and she’s the wife I must have now.”
She wept and took it ill, but there was no help for it; go he must.
Then she asked if she mightn’t go with him.
No, she mightn’t.
“Tell me the way then,” she said, “and I’ll search you out; that surely I may get leave to do.”