The friendship of King Loc for Bee had largely increased in a few moments, and, as he already hoped to marry her when she was of age, and through her to reconcile men and dwarfs, he feared that George might at some time become his rival and disturb his plans. This is why he knit his eyebrows and walked off, drooping his head like a worried man.
Bee, seeing she had vexed him, gently plucked at the skirt of his coat.
"Little King Loc," she said in a sad and tender voice, "why do we each of us make the other unhappy?"
"Bee, it is the fault of circumstances," answered King Loc; "I cannot take you back to your mother, but I will send her a dream which will inform her of your fate, dear Bee, and console her."
"Little King Loc," answered Bee, smiling through her tears, "you have had a good idea, but I will tell you what you ought to do. Every night you ought to send my mother a dream in which she will see me and send me a dream in which I will see my mother."
King Loc promised to do so. And what he said he did. Each night Bee saw her mother, and each night the Duchess saw her daughter. This satisfied their affection a little.
CHAPTER X
IN WHICH THE WONDERS OF THE KINGDOM OF THE
DWARFS ARE THOROUGHLY DESCRIBED, AS
WELL AS THE DOLLS WHICH WERE GIVEN TO BEE
The kingdom of the dwarfs was deep and stretched under a great part of the earth. Though the sky was only visible here and there through openings in the rock, the open places, the roads, the palaces, and hall were not buried in the thickest night. Only a few rooms and several caverns remained in darkness. The others were lighted, not by lamps and torches, but by planets and meteors which shed a wild, fantastic brightness, and this brightness shone upon strange marvels. Enormous buildings had been hewn in the face of the rock: in certain places palaces cut out of granite rose to such a height up under the vaults of the huge caverns that their stone carvings disappeared in a mist pierced by the yellowish light of little planets less luminous than the moon.
There were in those kingdoms fortresses of stupendous mass, amphitheatres whose stone tiers formed a semicircle which the eye could not embrace in its full extent, and vast wells with sculptured sides in which no plummet could ever have found a bottom. All these structures, apparently unsuited to the stature of their inhabitants, agreed perfectly with their quaint fantastic turn of mind.