She answers, “I am very happy here. I have no longing for it.”
“Yes, if you like, you may go for three days.”
He gives her a ring, and says to her, “If that changes colour, I shall be ill, and if it turns to blood, I shall be in great misery.”[84]
The young lady sets out for her father’s house. Her father was very glad (to see her). Her sisters said to her:
“You must be happy there. You are prettier than you were before. With whom do you live there?”
She told them, “With a serpent.” They would not believe her. The three days flew by like a dream, and she forgot her serpent. The fourth day she looked at her ring, and she saw that it was changed. She rubs it with her finger, and it begins to bleed. Seeing that she goes running to her father, and says to him that she is going. She arrives at the castle, and finds everything sad. The music will not play—everything was shut up. She called the serpent (his name was Azor, and hers Fifine). She kept on calling and crying out to him, but Azor appeared nowhere. After having searched the whole house, after having taken off her shoes, she goes to the garden, and there too she cries out. She finds a corner of the earth in the garden quite frozen, and immediately she makes a great fire over this spot, and there Azor comes out, and he says to her:[85]
“You had forgotten me, then. If you had not made this fire, it would have been all up with me.”
Fifine said to him, “Yes, I had forgotten you, but the ring made me think of you.”
Azor said to her, “I knew what was going to happen; that is why I gave you the ring.”
And coming into the house, she finds it as before, all full of rejoicings—the music was playing on all sides. Some days after that Azor said to her: