ul that they dazzled her eyes; and the Prince was
there kissing her, and in a minute they were married, and went floating
off in a dance, which was so swift it did not feel so much like dancing
as it did like being carried through the air by a gentle wind.

Through room after room,--there seemed no end to the rooms, and each one
more beautiful than the last,--from garden to garden,--some full of
trees, some with beautiful lakes in them, some full of solid beds of
flowers,--they went, sometimes dancing, sometimes walking, sometimes, it
seemed to the Little Sweetheart, floating. Every hour there was some new
beautiful thing to see, some new beautiful thing to do. And the Prince
never left her for more than a few minutes; and when he came back he
brought her gifts and kissed her. Gifts upon gifts he kept bringing,
till the Little Sweetheart's hands were so full she had to lay the
things down on tables or window-sills, wherever she could find place for
them,--which was not easy, for all the rooms were so full of beautiful
things that it was difficult to move about without knocking something
down.

The hours flew by like minutes. The sun came up high in the heavens, but
nobody seemed tired; nobody stopped,--dance, dance, whirl, whirl, song
and laughter and ceaseless motion. That was all that was to be seen or
heard in this wonderful Court to which the Little Sweetheart had been
brought.

Noon came, but nothing stopped. Nobody left off dancing, and the
musicians played faster than ever.

And so it was all the long afternoon and through the twilight; and as
soon as it was really dark, all the rooms and the gardens and the lakes
blazed out with millions of lamps, till it was lighter far than day; and
the ladies' dresses, as they danced back and forth, shone and sparkled
like butterflies' wings.

At last the lamps began, one by one, to go out, and by degrees a soft
sort of light, like moonlight, settled down on the whole place; and the
fine-dressed servants that had robed the Little Sweetheart in her white
satin gown took it off, and put her to bed in a gold bedstead, with
golden silk sheets.

"Oh," thought the Little Sweetheart, "I shall never go to sleep in the
world, and I'm sure I don't want to! I shall just keep my eyes open all
night, and see what happens next."

All the beautiful clothes she had taken off were laid on a sofa near the
bed,--the white satin dress at top, and the big pink satin slipper, with
its hug