"I did not think that my release would give me pain. And yet it has. Good-bye, sir."
"I wish you a good journey," King Loc cried roughly.
Now this staircase ended in a lonely quarry which lay less than a league from the castle of the Clarides.
King Loc pursued his way muttering:
"This boy has neither the learning nor the wealth of the dwarfs. I do not really know why he is loved by Bee, unless it is that he is young, handsome, loyal, and bold."
He returned to the town laughing to himself like a man who has played a practical joke on some one. Passing in front of Bee's house, he pushed his big head through the window, as he had done into the glass funnel, and he saw the young girl embroidering a veil with silver flowers.
"Rejoice, Bee," he said to her.
"And you," she answered, "little King Loc, may you never have anything to wish for, or at least anything to regret."
There was something he wished for, but really he had nothing to regret. This thought gave him a large appetite for supper. After eating a great number of truffled pheasants, he called Bob.
"Bob," he said to him, "get on your crow: go to the Princess of the Dwarfs and tell her that George of the White Moor, who was for a long time a prisoner of the Sylphs, returned to-day to the Clarides."