Page:The sleeping beauty and other fairy tales from the old French (1910).djvu/132

Beauty and the Beast they were met by a great salvo of guns and, as the echoes died away, by the sound of soft music within the palace.

The horse had come to a stop, by a flight of agate steps a light shone down these steps from a porchway within which the violins kept their throbbing. Beauty slipped down from the saddle, and her father, alighting after her, took her by the hand and led her to the chamber in which he had first supped; where, sure enough, they found a cheerful fire and a score of candles lit and burning with an exquisite perfume, and—best of all—a table laid with the daintiest of suppers.

The merchant, accustomed to the ways of their host, knew that the supper was meant for them, and Beauty fell-to with a good appetite. Her spirits indeed were rising. There had been no sign of any Beast in all the many rooms through which she had passed, and everything in them had seemed to breathe of gaiety and good living.

But this happy frame of mind did not last long. They had scarcely finished supper when the Beast was heard coming through the distant rooms. At the sound—the heavy padding of his feet, the roar 92