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Rh never happy when he was out of her sight, and was always praising him. "But for Avenant," she would say to the king, "I should never have been here. For my sake he has done impossibilities. You should feel deeply indebted to him. He obtained for me the water of beauty. I shall never grow old, and I shall always remain handsome." The envious courtiers who heard the queen express herself thus, said to the king, "You are not jealous, and yet you have good cause to be so. The queen is so deeply in love with Avenant, that she can neither eat nor drink. She can talk of nothing but him, and of the obligations you are under to him. As if any one else it had pleased you to send to her would not have done as much!" "That's quite true," said the king, "now I think of it. Let him be put in the tower, with irons on his hands and feet." Avenant was accordingly seized, and in return for his faithful service to the king, fettered hand and foot in a dungeon. He was allowed to see no one but the gaoler, who threw him a morsel of black bread through a hole, and gave him some water in an earthen pan. His little dog Cabriolle, however, did not desert him; but came daily to console him and tell him all the news. When the Fair with Golden Hair heard of Avenant's disgrace, she flung herself at the king's feet, and, bathed in tears, implored him to release Avenant from prison. But the more she entreated, the more angry the king became, for he thought to himself, "It is because she loves him;" so he refused to stir in the matter. The queen ceased to urge him, and fell into a deep melancholy.

The king took it into his head, that perhaps she did not think him handsome enough. He longed to wash his face with the water of beauty, in hopes that the queen would then feel more affection for him. The phial full of this water stood on the chimney-piece in the queen's chamber: she had placed it there for the pleasure of looking at it more frequently: but one of her chamber-maids, trying to kill a spider with a broom, unfortunately threw down the phial, which broke in the fall, and all the water was lost. She swept the fragments of glass away quickly; and not knowing what to do, it suddenly occurred to her, that she had seen in the king's cabinet a phial precisely similar, full of water, as clear as the water of beauty; so, without a word to any one,