“You do not know then why you have come here? You are to sleep with me.”
The young girl says: “You shall cut me in pieces on the spot before I will go to your bed. I have a husband, and I wish to be faithful to him.”
And she tells, on his asking her, how that she was very poor, and no one loved her, and how a rich gentleman had wished to marry her—how very good he had been to her even after the marriage, and how when he went on a voyage he had left her at his mother’s house, thinking that she would be best there, and that since he was gone she had had no news of her husband. The gentleman said to her:
“Would you recognise your husband?” She says, “Yes.”
“Has he any marks?”
The young girl says, “Yes; he has a mole between his two breasts with three hairs on it.”
The gentleman opens his shirt and shows her his birthmark.
This young girl was seized with such joy that she fainted away, and fell down on the floor. As this gentleman knew the ways of the room he burst open the closet, and took a bottle of liqueur to bring his wife round again, and at last she came to herself, and passes a sweet night with her husband.
The next morning the geese come, cackle, cackle, before the door, and the mistress of the house and her daughter come to the gentleman’s door, calling out, if they have not stopped there long enough, that it is time to set off, and that it is a shame to be in bed at that hour. The gentleman gets up and says to his mother:
“What, mother, was this the way that you ought to have treated my dearly-loved wife?”