There was once a very rich family with a single son, and they indulged him in everything.
Walking in the market one day, the son saw a girl selling face powder, and thought her beautiful. He had no way of speaking to her, so he took to buying powder. Every day he went to the market, bought his packet, and left without a word.
This went on so long that the girl grew suspicious.
“You buy this powder every day,” she said. “What do you do with it?”
“I love you,” he said. “I did not dare say so. I only wanted to see you, so I bought the powder as an excuse to stand and look at you.”
The girl was silent a long moment. Then she said, quietly: “Come tomorrow night.”
He went home and lay down to wait, and the waiting was so long that he fell asleep — and in his sleep she came to him, and he took her by the arm and said I have what I wanted, and his heart broke with it, and he died.
The girl fled in terror, and in the morning she was back at her stall, selling powder.
The parents found their son dead in his bed with no wound on him and no mark, and the only thing in the room was a packet of face powder. They followed the powder to the market, found the stall, bought a packet, and held it beside the one in the dead boy’s room: the same hand, the same paper, the same knot.
They took the girl before the magistrate.
She wept and told the whole story: the daily purchase, the question, the promise, the night. “I came,” she said, “and he was glad, and then he died. I was frightened, and I ran. I did not kill him.”
The magistrate did not believe her. Neither did the boy’s parents. But the magistrate’s own son, who had heard the case, said: “Father — a girl can weep a man to death and a girl can weep a man back. Let her go to the body and weep. If he does not wake, hang her.”
So they took her to the house and let her into the room alone, and she went to the bed and knelt down and wept and said: I did not mean to kill you. Come back, and I will marry you, and I will never run again.
And the dead boy — the record says simply this — suddenly revived.
He sat up. He had no memory of dying, only of being glad.
They were married. And the story ends, as the best of the genre do, with a sentence that quietly restores the world: that the boy lived a long life, and his parents got grandchildren, and the girl sold face powder no more.