r tongue it turned
out to be quite black, so that would not have deceived the King either.

"Am I not unlucky?" cried the poor Princess; "I lose everything I love,
and am none the better for it."

"If you had accepted my offer," said Tintin, "you would only have had me
to regret, and I should have had all your gratitude."

Miranda kissed her little dog, crying so bitterly, that at last she
could bear it no longer, and turned away into the forest. When she
looked back the Captain of the Guard was gone, and she was alone, except
for Patypata, Grabugeon, and Tintin, who lay upon the ground. She could
not leave the place until she had buried them in a pretty little mossy
grave at the foot of a tree, and she wrote their names upon the bark of
the tree, and how they had all died to save her life. And then she began
to think where she could go for safety--for this forest was so close to
her father's castle that she might be seen and recognized by the first
passer-by, and, besides that, it was full of lions and wolves, who would
have snapped up a princess just as soon as a stray chicken. So she began
to walk as fast as she could, but the forest was so large and the sun
was so hot that she nearly died of heat and terror and fatigue; look
which way she would there seemed to be no end to the forest, and she
was so frightened that she fancied every minute that she heard the King
running after her to kill her. You may imagine how miserable she was,
and how she cried as she went on, not knowing which path to follow, and
with the thorny bushes scratching her dreadfully and tearing her pretty
frock to pieces.

At last she heard the bleating of a sheep, and said to herself:

"No doubt there are shepherds here with their flocks; they will show me
the way to some village where I can live disguised as a peasant girl.
Alas! it is not always kings and princes who are the happiest people in
the world. Who could have believed that I should ever be obliged to run
away and hide because the King, for no reason at all, wishes to kill
me?"

So saying she advanced toward the place where she heard the bleating,
but what was her surprise when, in a lovely little glade quite
surrounded by trees, she saw a large sheep; its wool was as white as
snow, and its horns shone like gold; it had a garland of flowers round
its neck, and strings of great pearls about its legs, and a collar of
diamonds; it lay upon a bank of orange-flowers, under a canopy of