The Little Sweetheart sat up in bed and looked around her.  She thought it very strange that she was all alone! the Prince gone,—­no one there to attend to her.  In a few moments more she noticed that all her clothes were gone, too.

“Oh,” she thought, “I suppose one never wears the same clothes twice in this Court, and they will bring me others!  I hope there will be two slippers alike, to-day.”

Presently she began to grow impatient; but, being a timid little creature, and having never before seen the inside of a Court or been a Prince’s sweetheart, she did not venture to stir, or to make any sound,—­only sat still in her bed, waiting to see what would happen.  At last she could not bear the sounds of the dancing and laughing and playing and singing any longer.  So she jumped up, and, rolling one of the golden silk sheets around her, looked out of the window.  There they all were, the crowds of gay people, just as they had been the day before when she was among them, whirling, dancing, laughing, singing.  The tears came into the Little Sweetheart’s eyes as she gazed.  What could it mean that she was deserted in this way,—­not even her clothes left for her?  She was as much a prisoner in her room as if the door had been locked.

As hour after hour passed, a new misery began to oppress her.  She was hungry,—­seriously, distressingly hungry.  She had been too happy to eat the day before!  Though she had sipped and tasted many delicious beverages and viands, which the Prince had pressed upon her, she had not taken any substantial food, and now she began to feel faint for the want of it.  As noon drew near,—­the time at which she was accustomed in her father’s house to eat dinner,—­the pangs of her hunger grew 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!”