'I _am_ Florine!' she said. 'And I want your willing help.'
The head valet stared at her in dismay. Then his face changed. He bowed to her with the utmost respect, and said: 'Princess, I am your faithful slave; command me and I will obey.'
'First, then,' said Florine, 'do not give the Prince the draught to-night; and find me an apartment next to his.'
'It shall be done,' replied the valet, and with a low bow he withdrew to make the arrangement.
'Stay!' cried Florine as he was going. 'I forbid you to tell the Prince a word of this. You understand?'
'And obey,' he replied, bowing again and again as he left her presence, walking backwards in respect to high royalty.
That night the Prince, impatient to forget the face of Truitonne, called for his sleeping-draught. The head valet appeared, bearing a flavoured mixture in a crystal goblet on a golden tray. The Prince drank it. By its taste it was the draught, but, by its effect, it was not. No sleep came to him, and the face of Truitonne grew uglier and uglier in his mind. Presently he started up.
It came from the next apartment--the sound of a woman weeping. He listened, and in the stillness of the palace the sound came clearly. He knew that voice: it was the voice of his dear Princess Florine, just as he used to hear it when, as a Blue Bird, he spoke with her at her window.
In a moment he arose and dressed himself in his royal robes. While he was doing this, Florine in the next room took another egg from the box, and, throwing it upon the floor, cried: 'I wish that, by storm and lightning, all that is evil and ugly in this palace shall be destroyed, and all that is good and beautiful left.'
As she spoke the rising wind wailed about the palace and died away; dull thunder reverberated in the distance. The air grew stifling, and the night flowers paid their perfumes out like threatened debtors. Another rush of wind, then silence broken only by a peal of thunder nearer than before. The splash of heavy drops was heard on the flagstones of the courtyard below. The lightning was seen to flash through the windows, and the thunder shook the castle to its foundations.
Nearer and nearer loomed the storm, growing more terrific every moment. Every one was up and running about in panic. Those with ugly souls and bodies, if their consciences were also wicked, went mad in the panic, and fled in a body from the palace, thinking the end of the world had come. But those whose consciences were clear, whose hearts were true--those who could never be called ugly, no matter what they looked like--they sought the Prince and gathered round him, while the palace shuddered as all the storm gods poured out their wrath.