“How very badly you have treated her!” said the wise woman.  “Poor child!”

“Treated her badly?” gasped the king.

“She is a very wicked child,” said the queen; and both glared with indignation.

“Yes, indeed!” returned the wise woman.  “She is very naughty indeed, and that she must be made to feel; but it is half your fault too.”

“What!” stammered the king.  “Haven’t we given her every mortal thing she wanted?”

“Surely,” said the wise woman:  “what else could have all but killed her?  You should have given her a few things of the other sort.  But you are far too dull to understand me.”

“You are very polite,” remarked the king, with royal sarcasm on his thin, straight lips.

The wise woman made no answer beyond a deep sigh; and the king and queen sat silent also in their anger, glaring at the wise woman.  The silence lasted again for a minute, and then the wise woman folded her cloak around her, and her shining garment vanished like the moon when a great cloud comes over her.  Yet another minute passed and the silence endured, for the smouldering wrath of the king and queen choked the channels of their speech.  Then the wise woman turned her back on them, and so stood.  At this, the rage of the king broke forth; and he cried to the queen, stammering in his fierceness,—­

“How should such an old hag as that teach Rosamond good manners?  She knows nothing of them herself!  Look how she stands!—­actually with her back to us.”

At the word the wise woman walked from the room.  The great folding doors fell to behind her; and the same moment the king and queen were quarrelling like apes as to which of them was to blame for her departure.  Before their altercation was over, for it lasted till the early morning, in rushed Rosamond, clutching in her hand a poor little white rabbit, of which she was very fond, and from which, only because it would not come to her when she called it, she was pulling handfuls of fur in the attempt to tear the squealing, pink-eared, red-eyed thing to pieces.

“Rosa, RosaMOND!” cried the queen; whereupon Rosamond threw the rabbit in her mother’s face.  The king started up in a fury, and ran to seize her.  She darted shrieking from the room.  The king rushed after her; but, to his amazement, she was nowhere to be seen:  the huge hall was empty.—­No:  just outside the door, close to the threshold, with her back to it, sat the figure of the wise woman, muffled in her dark cloak, with her head bowed over her knees.  As the king stood looking at her, she rose slowly, crossed the hall, and walked away down the marble staircase.  The king called to her; but she never turned her head, or gave the least sign that she heard him.  So quietly did she pass down the wide marble stair, that the king was all but persuaded he had seen only a shadow gliding across the white steps.

For the princess, she was nowhere to be found.  The queen went into hysterics; and the rabbit ran away.  The king sent out messengers in every direction, but in vain.