you talk! there is no lady here.' He said again, 'I know there is a beautiful lady here, for I saw her as I passed the open door.' She replied, 'If you come telling such tales about my house, I'll pull your tongue out.' For she thought to herself, 'Unless I scold him well, the boy'll go talking about what he has seen in the palace, and then perhaps some of the people from there will come and take the poor Panch-Phul Ranee away from my care.' But whilst the Malee's wife was talking to the young Prince, the Panch-Phul Ranee came from the inner room to watch and listen to him unobserved, and no sooner did she see him, than she could not forbear crying out, 'Oh, how like he is to my husband! The same eyes; the same shaped face, and the same king-like bearing! Can he be my son? He is just the age my son would have been had he lived!'
The young Prince heard her speaking, and asked what she said, to which the Malee's wife replied, 'The woman you saw, and who just now spoke, lost her child fourteen years ago, and she was saying to herself how like you were to that child, and thinking you must be the same, but she is wrong, for we know you are the Ranee's son.' Then Panch-Phul Ranee herself came out of the house, and said to him, 'Young Prince, I could not, when I saw you, help exclaiming how like you are to what my lost husband was, and to what my son might have been; for it is now fourteen years since I lost them both.' And then she told him how she had been a great Princess, and was returning with her husband to his own home (to which they had got half-way in reaching that place), and how her little baby had been born in the jungle, and her husband had gone away to seek shelter for her and the child, and fire and food, and had never returned; and also how, when she had fainted away, some one had certainly stolen her baby and left a dead child in its place, and how the good Malee's wife had befriended her, and taken her ever since to live in her house. And when she had ended her story she began to cry.
But the Prince said to her, 'Be of good cheer; I will endeavour to recover your husband and child for you: who knows but I may indeed be your son, beautiful lady?' And running home to the Ranee (his adopted mother), he said to her, ' Are you really my mother? Tell me truly; for this I must know before the sun goes down.' 'Why do you ask foolish questions?' she replied; 'have I not always treated you as a son?' 'Yes,' he said; 'but tell me in very truth, am I your own child? or the child of some one
