“I can tell you now,” he said, “now that it is all nearly over, who THEY were of whom you used to wonder that I spoke. The Green Frog and her servants were the visible forms of THEY to whom my punishment was committed. Yet, had I obeyed you,--which was part of my trial,--you, under whose care my friends, who advised you in the shape of the toad and the Toad-Woman, were allowed to place me, but little of this trouble would have come upon me. If I failed in obedience to you,--such was the condition,--if THEY gained the slightest hold upon me,--I must fall wholly into their power, and then only, if you really wished it, could your Love have power to overcome their Hate. And you know, Eva, how I fell into their hands.” “Yes, I know,” Eva said; “but I do not yet see why you crept into the crevice in the rock.” “How could I help it?” Aster asked. “After all I had done, and all that had happened before! Because what must be, will be, and THEY made me.” “And then, after you went into the rock?” Eva asked, eagerly. “Remember, I know nothing of that.” Then Aster told her how, in the crevice of the rock, he had found that the Green Frog lay in wait for him. How she and her servants had taken him, bound and tied with the same spider’s web from which Eva had, once before, in the forest, released him, to her hut in the field of mud. And how, when there, he had to lie in the mud, as a footstool for the Frog,--and that every night she made him stand before her, and would laugh at him, and ask him why Eva and his friends did not come to help him. “I was too proud,” Aster said, “and too angry, to call for you. I thought I should, by myself, be able to escape. I tried, but the power of THEY who kept me was too great for me, and I never once succeeded even in passing the strange fence around the hut. “But all the time, Eva, I knew--and it was part of my punishment--that an appeal to you could be heard, and that you would come to help me. But that I--I, a prince,--powerful at home, and only weak now because I had lost such a trifling thing as a flower, should be compelled to ask help of one who was able to help me only because she was gentler and kinder than I was,--I could not do it. Meantime, the Green Frog laughed at my efforts to escape. Yet, do what she would to me, I never called for you. She might hang me up in the spider’s web,--she might threaten to crush me,--I was silent. “At last I could stand it no longer, I must help to carry heavy stones, and when their weight nearly crushed me,--for though only shadows to you, they were realities to me,--I would have rested, the spider would sting me and scorch me with his poisonous breath,--the jackdaw peck me,--and the Green Frog would threaten to swallow me, and tell me that now you never would come to me, for the Dawn Fairies had made you forget me. And not till then, when they told me you had forgotten me, did I speak; and the only words that I said were these, ‘Eva! Eva! help me!’”