Page:The sleeping beauty and other fairy tales from the old French (1910).djvu/48

The Sleeping Beauty habit of remembering details, especially when it concerned setting folks at their ease. Before dinner he had dispatched a messenger to carry word to Prince Florimond's father, that his son was safe, and to acquaint him briefly with what had befallen. The messenger, riding through the undergrowth—which now obligingly parted before him as it had, a while ago, to admit the Prince—and arriving at the outskirts of the wood, found there a search-party vainly endeavouring to break through the barrier, with the Prince's aged father standing by and exhorting them in person, to whom he delivered his message. Trembling with relief—for he truly supposed his son to be lost beyond recall—the old man entreated the messenger to turn back and escort him. So he arrived, and was ushered into the hall.

The situation, to be sure, was delicate. But when these two kings, both so well meaning, had met and exchanged courtesies, and the one had raised the other by the hand to a place on the daïs beside him, already and without speech they had almost accorded.

'I am an old man,' said the Prince's father; 'I 24