Page:The Grey Fairy Book.djvu/296

282 you are an old woman, you shall be my mother. If you are a young one, you shall be my daughter. If you are middle-aged, you shall be my wife. So come out, and fear nothing.’

Then the maiden came out of her hiding-place, and stood before him.

‘Fear nothing,’ said the ogre again; and when he went away to hunt he left her to look after the house. In the evening he returned, bringing with him hares, partridges, and gazelles, for the girl’s supper; for himself he only cared for the flesh of men, which she cooked for him. He also gave into her charge the keys of six rooms, but the key of the seventh he kept himself.

And time passed on, and the girl and the ogre still lived together.

She called him ‘Father,’ and he called her ‘Daughter,’ and never once did he speak roughly to her.

One day the maiden said to him, ‘Father, give me the key of the upper chamber.’

‘No, my daughter,’ replied the ogre. ‘There is nothing there that is any use to you.’

‘But I want the key,’ she repeated again.

However the ogre took no notice, and pretended not to hear. The girl began to cry, and said to herself: ‘To-night, when he thinks I am asleep, I will watch and see where he hides it’; and after she and the ogre had supped, she bade him good-night, and left the room. In a few minutes she stole quietly back, and watched from behind a curtain. In a little while she saw the ogre take the key from his pocket, and hide it in a hole in the ground before he went to bed. And when all was still she took out the key, and went back to the house.

The next morning the ogre awoke with the first ray of light, and the first thing he did was to look for the key. It was gone, and he guessed at once what had become of it.

But instead of getting into a great rage, as most ogres