Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him
for a husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought,
"He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does;" and she said yes, and
laid her hand in his. She said, "I will willingly go away with you, but
I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time
that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready
I will descend, and you will take me on your horse." They agreed that
until that time he should come to her every evening, for the old woman
came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once
Rapunzel said to her, "Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are
so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King's son--he is with
me in a moment." "Ah! you wicked child," cried the enchantress, "what do
I hear you say! I thought I had separated you from all the world, and
yet you have deceived me!" In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's
beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair
of scissors with the right, and snip, snip, they were cut off, and the
lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took
poor Rapunzel into a desert, where she had to live in great grief and
misery.
On the same day, however, that she cast out Rapunzel, the enchantress in
the evening fastened the braids of hair which she had cut off to the
hook of the window, and when the King's son came and cried,
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair,"
she let the hair down.
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