But when the prince came to the sixth lady he found her, to his great astonishment, sitting at the bottom of the ditch, laughing.
Her hat had come off, her hair had come down, she was bedaubed with mud from head to foot, and her poor little hands were covered with nettle stings.
“We must have looked so funny all tumbling into the ditch,” she said. “I wish I could have seen it. We’re still rather a funny sight, aren’t we?”--and she looked down at herself and up at the weeping ladies on the bank, and laughed again.
There was so much mud on her face that the prince could not see what she really looked like, but he remembered the words of his aunt.
“What is the name of the sixth lady?” he asked, when they had all been bundled off home. “The one who laughed?”
So in the evening he sought out Mellidora and found that she was a most beautiful and charming person, so much so that he lost his heart to her forthwith.
“But I must do nothing in a hurry,” he said to himself. “After all, there is the other half of my aunt’s counsel to be considered. In any case, it would perhaps seem a little strange if I asked her to marry me quite so soon. We will see what happens to-morrow.”
On the next day all the ladies and gentlemen who were staying in the castle were to go out riding in the early morning.
The prince had slept late, and he stood for a moment at his window looking down on the courtyard, where there was a great bustling and prancing and making ready.
Through the midst of all this an old peasant woman was making her way.
She had a basket of eggs on her arm, and carefully laid on the top of it was a round flat cake, brown and spicy-looking, with a sugar heart in the middle of it, surrounded by pink and white sugar roses.
She had made it for a birthday gift for the King’s son. But she was a little confused by all the bustle in the courtyard, and scurried hither and thither among the horses and people like a frightened hen.
Presently one of the King’s servants pushed her out of the way. Her foot caught on the edge of a stone; she tripped and fell.
The eggs rolled out of the basket. Plop! Plop! they went on the stones.
There was a fine mess, and the beautiful cake lay in the midst of it, in fragments.