eautiful lady here,
for I saw her as I passed the open door." She replied, "If you come
telling such tales about my house, I'll pull your tongue out." For she
thought to herself, "Unless I scold him well, the boy 'll go talking
about what he's seen in the palace, and then perhaps some of the
people from there will come and take the poor Panch-Phul Ranee away
from my care." But while the Malee's wife was talking to the young
Prince, the Panch-Phul Ranee came from the inner room to watch and
listen to him unobserved; and no sooner did she see him than she could
not forbear crying out, "Oh, how like he is to my husband! The same
eyes, the same shaped face and the same king-like bearing! Can he be
my son? He is just the age my son would have been had he lived."

The young Prince heard her speaking and asked what she said, to which
the Malee's wife replied, "The woman you saw, and who just now spoke,
lost her child fourteen years ago, and she was saying to herself how
like you were to that child, and thinking you must be the same; but
she is wrong, for we know you are the Ranee's son." Then Panch-Phul
Ranee herself came out of the house, and said to him, "Young Prince, I
could not, when I saw you, help exclaiming how like you are to what my
lost husband was, and to what my son might have been; for it is now
fourteen years since I lost them both." And she told him how she had
been a great Princess, and was returning with her husband to his own
home and how her little baby had been born in the jungle, and her
husband had gone away to seek shelter for her and the child, and fire
and food, and had never returned; and also how, when she had fainted
away, someone had certainly stolen her baby and left a dead child in
its place; and how the good Malee's wife had befriended her, and taken
her ever since to live in her house. And when she had ended her story
she began to cry.

But the Prince said to her, "Be of good cheer; I will endeavour to
recover your husband and child for you; who knows but I may indeed be
your son, beautiful lady?" And running home to the Ranee (his adopted
mother), he said to her, "Are you really my mother? Tell me truly; for
this I must know before the sun goes down." "Why do you ask foolish
questions?" she replied; "have I not always treated you as a son?"
"Yes," he said; "but tell me the very truth; am I your own child, or
the child of someone else, adopted as yours? If you do not tell me, I
will kill mys