As they went, the body of this sweet-smelling Mélusine was warm and soft against his body, for Mélusine was not imprisoned in hard-feeling clothes such as were worn by your governesses and aunts. The monsters stationed along the way drew back as Mélusine passed; and some purred ingratiatingly, like gigantic kettles, and others made obeisances: and you met no other living creatures except three sheep that lay in the roadway asleep and very dingy with the dust of several hundred years. No self-respecting monster would have touched them. Thus Florian and Mélusine came through the forest without any hindrance or trouble, to the cleft in the mountain tops where the castle stood beside a lake: and Florian liked the stillness of all things in this high place, where the waters of the lake were without a ripple, and the tall grass and so many mist-white flowers were motionless. He liked it even more when Mélusine led him through such rooms in the castle as took his fancy. He was glad that Mélusine did not mind when Florian confessed the sleeping princess—in the room hung everywhere with curtains upon which people hunted a tremendous boar, and stuck spears through one another, and burst forth into peculiarly solid-looking yellow flames,—seemed to him even more lovely than was Mélusine. They were very much alike, though, the boy said: and Mélusine told him that was not unnatural, since Melior was her sister. And then, when Florian asked questions, Mélusine told him also of the old unhappiness that had been in this place, and of the reasons which had led her to put an enduring peacefulness upon her parents and her sister and all the other persons who slept here enchanted. Florian had before to-day heard century-old tales about Mélusine’s father, Helmas the Deep-Minded. So it was very nice actually to see him here in bed, with his scarlet and ermine robes neatly folded on the armchair, and his crown, with a long feather in it, hung on a peg in the wall, just as the King had left everything when he went to sleep several hundred years ago. The child found it all extremely interesting, quite like a fairy tale such as those which he had lately been reading in the book by old Monsieur Perrault of the Academy.