By the time he had finished telling me his distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you would have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity; that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which member of the family it was that was left.

So I took him over home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was, too -- typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happy tears; and by George! we found the aforetime young matron graying toward the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies all men and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywise themselves--for not a soul of the tribe was dead! Conceive of the ingenious devilishness of that queen: she had a special hatred for this prisoner, and she had _invented_ all those funerals herself, to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius of the whole thing was leaving the family-invoice a funeral _short_, so as to let him wear his poor old soul out guessing.
But for me, he never would have got out.

Morgan le Fay hated him with her whole heart, and she never would have softened toward him.
And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness than deliberate depravity.

He had said she had red hair.

Well, she had; but that was no way to speak of it.