Lubin looked at her and smiled, knowing how little she thought that he heard her words. “Ah! Princess Royal,” he said to himself, “there is another who should now be afraid, but is not.” Then for very spite the Princess began slapping her sister’s face. “Ah! wicked little sister,” she cried, “you have cheated me this time! But go back and wait till your hair has grown, and then my gown of gold shall be finished, although this once you have been too sly!” She threw down the shears, and drove her sister back by stair and passage, and through the looking-glass door at the other end. Lubin following, stayed first to watch how by a secret spring the Princess Royal closed the mirror back into the wall; then he slipped on before, and taking off his cap, lay down on his bed pretending to be fast asleep. He heard Princess Lyneth return to her couch, and then came the Princess Royal and ground her teeth at him in the darkness. Presently she, too, returned to her bed and lay down; and an hour after Lubin got up very softly and went into her chamber. There she lay asleep, with her beautiful hair all spread out upon the pillow; but Lubin had Princess Lyneth’s hair wound round his heart. He touched the secret spring, so that the mirror opened to him, and he passed through toward the little chamber where stood the loom. There hung the cloth of gold, all but finished; beside it the shears opened and snapped, giving out a blue light. He took up the shears in his hand, and pulled down the gold web from the loom, and back he went, closing the mirror behind him. Then he came to the Princess Royal as she lay asleep; and first he laid the cloth of gold over her, and saw how at once she became ten times more fair than she was by rights, as fair almost as her dead mother, lacking one part only. But her beauty did not win him to have pity on her. “There can be thieves, it seems, in high places!” he said; and with that he opened the shears over her head and let them snap: then all her long hair came out by the roots, and she lay white and withered before his eyes, and as bald as a stone. He gathered up all her hair with one hand, and the cloth of gold with the other, and went quietly away. Then, hiding the shears in a safe place, first he burnt the Princess Royal’s hair, till it became only a little heap of frizzled cinders; and after that he went to the chamber of the ten Princesses, whose hair and whose sweet youth had been stolen from them. There they lay all in a row in ten beds, with pale, gentle faces, asleep under their white wimples. He went to the first, and, laying the cloth of hair over her, cried: “Sister, sister, I bring you your hair, Of your Mother’s beauty I give you your share. One must grow pale, but you must grow fair!”