“Do you really, dear child?” cried Pluto, bending down his dark face to kiss her.  But Proserpina was a little afraid, he was so dark and severe-looking, and she shrank back.

“Well,” said Pluto, “it is just what I deserve after keeping you a prisoner all these months, and starving you besides.  Are you not dreadfully hungry, is there nothing I can get you to eat?”

In asking this Pluto was very cunning, as you will remember that if Proserpina once tasted any food in his kingdom, she would never again be able to go home.

“No, indeed,” said Proserpina.  “Your poor fat little cook is always making me all kinds of good things which I do not want.  The one thing I should like to eat would be a slice of bread baked by my own mother, and a pear out of her garden.”

When Pluto heard this he began to see that he had made a mistake in his way of trying to tempt Proserpina to eat.  He wondered why he had never thought of this before, and he at once sent a servant with a large basket to get some of the finest and juiciest pears in the whole world.

But this was just at the time when, as we know, Mother Ceres in her despair had forbidden any flowers or fruit to grow on the earth, and the only thing King Pluto’s servant could find, after seeking all over the world was a single dried-up pomegranate, so dried up as to be hardly worth eating.  Still, since there was no better to be had, he brought it back to the palace, put it on a magnificent gold plate, and carried it to Proserpina.

Now it just happened that as the servant was bringing the pomegranate in at the back door of the palace, Mercury had gone up to the front steps with his message to King Pluto about Proserpina.

As soon as Proserpina saw the pomegranate on the golden plate, she told the servant to take it away again.  “I shall not touch it, I can assure you,” she said.  “If I were ever so hungry, I should not think of eating such a dried-up miserable pomegranate as that.”

“It is the only one in the world,” said the servant, and he set down the plate and went away.

When he had gone, Proserpina could not help coming close to the table and looking at the dried-up pomegranate with eagerness.  To tell the truth, when she saw something that really suited her taste, she felt all her six months’ hunger come back at once.

To be sure it was a very poor-looking pomegranate, with no more juice in it than in an oyster-shell.  But there was no choice of such things in King Pluto’s palace, and this was the first fresh fruit Proserpina had ever seen there, and the last she was ever likely to see, and unless she ate it up at once, it would only get drier and drier and be quite unfit to eat.

“At least I may smell it,” she thought, so she took up the pomegranate and held it to her nose, and somehow, being quite near to her mouth, the fruit found its way into that little red cave.

Before Proserpina knew what she was about, her teeth had actually bitten it of their own accord.