King Alla was nearly heart-broken when he read these bad tidings, but he wrote back to wait all things till he returned, and to harm neither Constance nor her son.  Back rode the messenger to Donegilde once again.  She played her tricks over again and got him sound asleep.  Then she took the king’s letter and put one in its place commanding the governor to put Constance and her child aboard the ship in which she came to these shores and set her afloat.

The good governor could hardly believe his eyes when he read these orders, and the tears ran over his cheeks for grief.  But he dared not disobey what he supposed was the command of his king and master, so he made the vessel ready and went and told Constance what he must do.

She, poor soul, was almost struck dumb with grief.  Then, kneeling before the governor, she cried, with many tears,—­

“If I must go again on the cruel seas, at least this poor little innocent, who has done no evil, may be spared.  Keep my poor baby till his father comes back, and perchance he will take pity on him.”

But the governor dared not consent, and Constance must go to the ship, carrying her babe in her arms.  Through the street she walked, the people following her with tears, she with eyes fixed on heaven and the infant sobbing on her bosom.  Thus she went on board ship and drifted away again.

Now, for another season, she went about at the mercy of winds and waves, in icy waters where winds whistled through the frozen rigging, and down into tropical seas where she lay becalmed for months in the glassy water.  Then fresh breezes would spring up and drive her this way or that, as they listed.  But this time she had her babe for comfort, and he grew to be a child near five years old before she was rescued.  And this is the way it happened.  When the Emperor of Rome heard of the deeds the cruel Soldaness had done, and how his daughter’s husband had been slain, he sent an army to Syria, and all these years they had besieged the royal city till it was burnt and destroyed.  Now the fleet, returning to Rome, met the ship in which Constance sailed, and they fetched her and her child to her native country.  The senator who commanded the fleet was her uncle, but he knew her not, and she did not make herself known.  He took her into his own house, and her aunt, the senator’s wife, loved her greatly, never guessing she was her own princess and kinswoman.

When King Alla got back from his war with the Scots and heard how Constance had been sent away, he was very angry; but when he questioned and found the letter which had been sent him was false, and that Constance had borne him a beautiful boy, he knew not what to think.  When the governor showed him the letter with his own seal which directed that his wife and child should be sent away, he knew there was some hidden wickedness in all this.  He forced the messenger to tell where he had carried the letters, and he confessed he had slept two nights at the castle of Donegilde.