When the Prince neared his twentieth year, the King his father felt that he himself was becoming old and weary of life. “I shall not live much longer,” he thought: “very soon my son will be left alone in the world. It is right, therefore, now that he should know what is the danger that threatens his life.” For till then the Prince had not known anything; all had been kept a secret between the Queen and the King and the family Fairy. The old King knew of the Prince’s nine sorrows, and often he tried to believe that they came by chance, and had nothing to do with the secret that sat at the root of his son’s life. But now he feared more and more to tell the Prince the story of those nine dreams, lest the knowledge should indeed serve but as the crowning point of his sorrows, and altogether break his heart for him. Yet there was so much danger in leaving the thing untold that at last he summoned the Prince to his bedside, meaning to tell him all. The King had worn himself so ill with anxiety and grief in thinking over the matter, that now to tell all was the only means of saving his life. The Prince came and knelt down, and leaned his head on his father’s pillow; and the King whispered into his ear the story of the dreams, and of how for his sake all the Prince’s foster-sisters had been spirited away. Before his tale was done he could no longer bear to look into his son’s face, but closed his eyes, and, with long silences between, spoke as one who prayed. When he had ended he lay quite still, and the Prince kissed his closed eyelids and went softly out of the room. “Now I know,” he said to himself; “now at last!” And he came through the wood and knocked at his foster-mother’s door. “Other mother,” he said to her, “give me a kiss for each of my sisters, for now I am going out into the world to find them, to be rid of the sorrows in my heart.” “They can never be found!” she cried, but she kissed him nine times. “And this,” she said, “was Monica, and this was Ponica, and this was Veronica,” and so she went over every name. “But now they are only names!” she wept, as she let him go. He went along, and he went along, and he went along. “Where may you be going to, fair sir?” asked an old peasant at whose cabin the Prince sought shelter when night came to the first day of his wanderings. “Truly,” answered the Prince, “I do not know how far or whither I need to go; but I have a finger-post in my heart that keeps pointing me.” So that night he stayed there, and the next day he went on. “Where to so fast?” asked a wood-cutter when the second night found him in the thickest and loneliest parts of the forest. “Here the night is so dark and the way so dangerous, one like you should not go alone.” “Nay, I know nothing,” said the Prince, “only I feel like a weather-cock in a wind that keeps turning me to its will!”