The next day, the pilot sees the little prince talking to a poisonous yellow snake. The prince orders the snake to meet him later at the exact spot where they met a year ago. He asks, “Your poison is good? You’re sure it won’t make me suffer long?”

All this terrifies the pilot, who wants to kill the snake but cannot. It slithers away and disappears before the pilot can take a single shot with his revolver. The pilot tries to comfort the prince with water, but it does not seem to work. The prince looks frightened and says that his journey is extremely long and dangerous.

The pilot begs the little prince to laugh and promise to stay. But the little prince reminds him that the most important things, like the star and the flower, are invisible. Soon he will be invisible too. He explains that he is returning to his star, so from now on, the pilot will look at the stars and think of his friend. For different people, the stars have different meanings: they are guides for travelers, or problems for scholars to figure out, or gold for a businessman to collect. For the pilot, the stars will be more important than for anyone else:

When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing. You’ll have stars that can laugh!

The little prince begs the pilot not to come along for the meeting with the snake. He explains that his body is too heavy to travel to the stars, so he must leave it behind. He will appear to die, but he will not really die. Instead he will go home. The pilot refuses to stay behind, and the little prince cries because he knows how sad it will be for his friend to see him leave.

At the spot where the prince first landed, he reminds the pilot that he must return to his flower. “I am responsible for her. And she’s so weak! And so naïve.” He approaches the snake, who lashes out with one quick bite. His body falls silently to the ground.

As The Little Prince ends, the pilot explains that six years have passed since the prince left. When he finally made it home, his friends told him that he seemed sad, and he was too upset even to explain why. Now his grief is beginning to heal. He knows that the little prince got back to his planet. At night, the stars laugh “like five hundred million little bells.”

The pilot confesses that he was worried and hurried when he drew the muzzle for the little prince’s sheep. Because of this, he forgot to include a strap for fastening it shut. He wonders if the sheep has eaten the flower. Part of him thinks that this is impossible; the little prince would never be careless enough to let it happen. When he can make himself believe this, the laughter of the stars seems perfect.

But sometimes the pilot worries: What if the prince is distracted, just once, for a moment? What if he forgets to protect the flower? When the pilot thinks this way, the stars seem to cry.

On the final page of the story, the pilot invites the reader to look up at the stars at night and think, “Has the sheep eaten the flower or not?” This is a vital question even if it cannot be answered, and even if “no grown-up will ever understand how such a thing could be so important!”