Queen:  Where’s the use of crying and roaring?  The thing must be stopped and put an end to.  I don’t say I give in to your story, but that would be an unnatural death.  I would be scandalised being stepmother to a girl that would be swallowed by a sea-serpent!

Nurse:  Ochone!  Don’t be talking of it at all!

Queen:  At the King of Alban’s Court, one of the royal family to die over, it will be naturally on a pillow, and the dead-bells ringing, and a burying with white candles, and crape on the knocker of the door, and a flagstone put over the grave.  What way could we put a stone or so much as a rose-bush over Nuala and she in the inside of a water-worm might be ploughing its way down to the north of the world?

Nurse:  Och! that is what is killing me entirely!  O save her, save her.

King:  I tell you, it being to be, it will be.

Queen:  You may be right, so, when you would not go to the expense of paying her charges at the Royal school.  But wait, now, there is a plan coming into my mind.

Nurse:  There must surely be some way!

Queen:  It is likely a king’s daughter the beast—­if there is a beast—­will come questing after, and not after a king’s wife.

Dall Glic:  That is according to custom.

Queen:  That’s what I am saying.  What we have to do is to join Nuala with a man of a husband, and she will be safe from the danger ahead of her.  In all the inventions made by poets, for to put terror on children or to knock laughter out of fools, did any of you ever hear of a Dragon swallowing the wedding ring?

All:  We never did.

Queen:  It’s easy enough so.  There must be no delay till Nuala will be married and wed with someone that will bring her away out of this, and let the Dragon go hungry home!

Nurse:  That she may!  Isn’t it a pity now she being so hard to please!

Queen:  Young people are apt to be selfish and to have no thought but for themselves.  She must not be hard to please when it will be to save and to serve her family and to keep up respect for their name.  Here she is coming.

Nurse:  Ah, you would not tell her!  You would not put the dear child under the shadow of such a terror and such a threat!

King:  She must not be told.  I never could bear up against it.

(Nuala comes in.)

Queen: Look now at your father the way he is.

Princess:  (Touching his hand.) What is fretting you?

Queen: His heart as weighty as that the chair near broke under him.

Princess: I never saw you this way before.

Queen: And all on the head of yourself!

Princess: I am sorry, and very sorry, for that.

Queen: He is loth to say it to you, but he is tired and wore out waiting for you to settle with some match.  See what a troubled look he has on his face.