That very moment an avalanche was set free from the snow-clad slopes of the glacier, rolled down with angry thunder, and at the cross where once Tony had sworn faithful love to Vreneli it overtook him and his heartless bride, and buried them so deep that their bodies were never found. Thus King Laurin avenged his adopted daughter.

Vreneli had found a home, and, instead of the one worthless heart that she had lost, a thousand hearts beat true to her in unchanging love.

King Laurin loved her as he had once loved his own lost child, and she returned his affection with all the warmth of her young heart, while the little dwarfs obeyed her every wish with that cheerful eagerness with which they had once served their lost princess.

She tended the rose-garden beside the king's crystal palace with such loving care that it bloomed once more as in the days in which the magic-mighty hand of the princess had moved among its fairy blossoms, and the sweet fragrance that the roses breathed into her very soul healed every wound of disappointed love.

She did not miss the sunlight in this fairy kingdom, for the mild radiance of unseen stars lit it day and night; she never longed for earth, for here was unchanging spring; warm breezes kissed her brow, and the wild chamois, shy dwellers of the mountain solitudes, came up in friendly confidence, and let her stroke them with her snow-white hand.

Many a time on starry nights she went by King Laurin's side out to the glacier peaks, to look around upon the slumbering land. Her eye, made keen by the light of the fairy world, pierced the distance and the darkness of night, and she gazed, even unaided by any "magic ring," far beyond the boundaries which limit human vision. And what had once driven her from the region of sunlight she saw always and everywhere--sorrow, injustice, and untruth.

And when she looked into many a joyless cottage and many a sorrowful heart, she would turn to the old king by her side, kiss his hand with loving reverence, and say, smiling--"Come, King Laurin, let us go back to our home, to our peaceful kingdom, where tears and guilt and fickleness are all unknown." 

Evening was falling with the mild beauty of spring on the mountains and pasture-lands of the Tyrol. The latest sunbeams which streamed down from the lofty glacier bore the tones of the vesper bell through the quiet village street, and floated over the brook and in at the open windows of a substantial farm-house which stood at the end of the 

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