“So now, I’ll tell you what it is. But you must promise not to tell anyone in the whole, wide world about it, as long as you live.” Dino promised, giving his hand again for solemn assurance. “Look, here on both sides of my forehead,” said Cornelli now, hesitating a little and pushing the fringes of hair out of her face, “I have two large bumps, they grow all the time and especially when I frown. I have to make a cross face all the time, for I cannot be jolly any more and can never laugh again. So the bumps keep on growing and in the end they will be just like regular horns. Then everyone will hate me, for nobody else has horns. I can do nothing now but hide them, but in the end they will come through and then my hair won’t hide them any more. Then everybody can see it and people will despise me and children will be sure to throw stones after me. Oh!” Cornelli again put her head on her arms and groaned in her great trouble. Dino had listened, full of astonishment. He had never before heard anything like that. “But, Cornelli,” he said, “why do you frown all the time, if the bumps grow when you do it? It would be so much better if you would think of funny things and would try to laugh. If you always made a pleasant face they would perhaps go away entirely.” “I can’t! I can’t possibly do it,” Cornelli lamented. “I know that I make a horrid face and that I am so ugly that nobody wants to look at me. Whenever anybody looks at me I have to make a cross face, for I know that everybody thinks how horrid I look. I never can be happy any more, because I have to think all the time about that terrible thing on my head, and that it is getting worse. And I can’t help it and can do nothing. You don’t know how it is. As long as I live I have to be that way, and everybody will hate me. You could not laugh any more, either, if you were like that.” “You should try to think of quite different things and then you would forget it. Later on it would probably seem quite different to you. You keep on thinking about it all the time and so you believe in it more and more. Get it out of your head, then it will be sure to get better,” said Dino, who could not quite understand it. “Come, I’ll tell you a story that will change your thoughts. Once upon a time there was an old copper pan---See, you have laughed already!” “Oh, that will be a fine kind of story--about an old copper pan!” Cornelli said. “It certainly is a fine story,” Dino assured her; “just listen: She had a step-brother who was a wash boiler--you see, you have laughed again! That’s the way! So they went together to Paris, where there was a revolution.” “What is a revolution?” Cornelli asked, quite thrilled.