"Bee, you are going to see your mother again. But listen. Every night, as you know, I send your image to your mother. Every night, she sees your dear shape. She smiles and speaks to it, and kisses it. To-night I am going to show you, instead of your ghost. You will see her; but do not touch her, do not speak of her, for then the charm would be broken, and she will never again see you nor your image, which she does not distinguish from yourself."
"I will therefore be careful, alas! little King Loc ... there it is, there it is!"
There was the Keep of the Clarides rising black on the hill. Bee hardly had time to send a kiss to the old, well-beloved stones; now she saw, blooming with gilliflowers, the ramparts of the town of the Clarides fly past her; now she was going up along a slope where glow-worms shone in the grass to the postern gate, which King Loc opened easily, for the dwarfs, the metal workers, are not stopped by locks, padlocks, bolts, chains, and bars.
She went up the spiral staircase leading to her mother's room and stopped to put her two hands to her beating heart. The door opened slowly, and, by the light of a lamp hung from the ceiling, Bee saw, in the brooding, religious silence, her mother, worn and pale, her hair silvered at the temples, but more beautiful thus for her daughter than in the days gone by of splendid jewels and fearless rides. As the mother saw her daughter in a dream, she opened her arms to embrace her. And the child, laughing and sobbing, tried to cast herself into these open arms; but King Loc tore her from this embrace and carried her off like a straw over the dark champaign, down into the kingdom of the dwarfs.
CHAPTER XIV
IN WHICH THE GREAT GRIEF THAT OVERTOOK
KING LOC IS SEEN
Bee, seated on the granite steps of the subterranean palace, again gazed at the blue sky through the fissure in the stone. High above the elder trees turned their white umbels towards the light. Bee began to cry. King Loc took her by the hand and said to her:
"Bee, why are you crying and what do you want?"
And, as she had been sad for several days, the dwarfs seated at her feet were playing to her very simple tunes on the flute, the flageolet, the rebec, and the cymbals. Other dwarfs turned, to please her, such somersaults, that one after the other they stuck in the ground the tips of their hoods decorated with a plume of leaves; nothing could be more diverting to see than the sports of these little men with their hermit beards. The good Tad, the romantic Dig, who loved her from the day they had seen her sleeping on the edge of the lake, and Pic, the old poet, took her gently by the arm and begged her to tell them the secret of her grief. Paw, who was simple but sensible, held up to her grapes in a basket, and all, tugging the edge of her dress, repeated with King Loc:
"Bee, princess of the dwarfs, why are you weeping?"