"Me he could not change, as I wear upon my arm a bracelet placed there by a good fairy at my birth, which guards me from enchantment and harm. "I lived then in the Magician's house, and his old witch of a housekeeper and her ugly daughter made me do all manner of rough work, and many a time would have beaten me had it not been for my magic bracelet. At any rate they half starved me. I lived in the cellar when I was not working in the kitchen." "My dear," said the Duchess, "how can you expect us to believe such a story? You say you were fourteen when all this happened. You cannot be more than twenty now, and yet the Island of Despair has been where it is for over seventy years." "Yes," said the Princess, "that is true, but the Evil Magician does not measure years as you do. On his kitchen wall hangs the year clock. It has only one hand, and the figures on its face run from one to fifteen. Each figure represents one of your years, but the hand of the clock has to go completely around the dial and reach the figure fifteen before the Magician counts a year. In therefore what has been five years to us in the Magician's house has been seventy-five years to you. That is the reason why the Magician and the witch seem so old to you, who know that they have been living for hundreds of years. They are really not very old after all." "But how did you get here?" asked Prince Redmond, who was becoming very much interested in the small Princess. "One day," answered the Princess, "I overhead the Evil Magician telling the old witch to prepare a bed in the cellar for a Queen." "Good mercy," cried the Duchess. "My dear niece in that dreadful place. Oh, what shall I do?" And she began to weep afresh, but Daimur was so interested in the story that he hardly heard her. "What happened next?" he asked breathlessly. "The next day the Queen arrived, so beautiful and so sad. I loved her at once, and was happy to be with her when I might. She told me that she had a chest full of gold in her palace, but that her aunt had the key to it, and that she had mysteriously disappeared. She was afraid she had been murdered. A foreign king, a kind of pirate, had been threatening to invade her kingdom for more than a year, and she had been able to keep him off for a time, but at last she had no more soldiers to oppose against him and he would have taken the kingdom had not the Evil Magician, in the form of a young and handsome knight, offered to lend her as much gold as was in the treasure chest until such time as she could get another key, for she had found that the chest was a magic one and could neither be broken into nor moved from where it stood. "The pirate king took the money and went away, but in a few months the Evil Magician came back and demanded payment for his gold or that the Queen would marry him at once.