w
unbearable.

"I can't bear it another minute," she said to herself. "I must, and I
will, have something to eat! I will slip down by some back way to the
kitchen. There must be a kitchen, I suppose."

So saying, she opened one of the doors, and timidly peered into the next
room. It chanced to be the room with the great glass cases, full of fine
gowns and laces, where she had been dressed by the obsequious attendants
on the previous day. No one was in the room. Glancing fearfully in all
directions, she rolled the golden silk sheet tightly around her, and
flew, rather than ran, across the floor, and took hold of the handle of
one of the glass doors. Alas! it was locked. She tried another,--another;
all were locked. In despair she turned to fly back to her bedroom, when
suddenly she spied on the floor, in a corner close by the case where hung
her beautiful white satin dress, a little heap of what looked like brown
rags. She darted toward it, snatched it from the floor, and in a second
more was safe back in her room; it was her own old stuff gown.

"What luck!" said the Little Sweetheart; "nobody will ever know me in
this. I'll put it on, and creep down the back stairs, and beg a mouthful
of food from some of the servants, and they'll never know who I am; and
then I'll go back to bed, and stay there till the Prince comes to fetch
me. Of course, he will come before long; and if he comes and finds me
gone, I hope he will be frightened half to death, and think I have been
carried off by robbers!"

Poor foolish Little Sweetheart! It did not take her many seconds to slip
into the ragged old stuff gown; then she crept out, keeping close to the
walls, so that she could hide behind the furniture if any one saw her.

She listened cautiously at each door before she opened it, and turned
away from some where she heard sounds of merry talking and laughing. In
the third room that she entered she saw a sight that arrested her
instantly and made her cry out in astonishment,--a girl who looked so
much like her that she might have been her own sister, and, what was
stranger, wore a brown stuff gown exactly like her own, was busily at
work in this room with a big broom killing spiders! As the Little
Sweetheart appeared in the doorway, this girl looked up, and said: "Oh,
ho! there you are, are you? I thought you'd be out before long." And
then she laughed unpleasantly.

"Who are you?" said the Little Sweetheart, beginning to tremble al