went
through all the--what should he call it?--the behaviour of presenting
him to her grandmother, talking now to her and now to him, while all
the time he saw nothing but a bare garret, a heap of musty straw, a
sunbeam, and a withered apple. Lady, he would have declared before the
king himself, young or old, there was none, except the princess
herself, who was certainly vexed that he could not see what she at
least believed she saw.

As for his mother, she had once seen, long before Curdie was born, a
certain mysterious light of the same description as one Irene spoke of,
calling it her grandmother's moon; and Curdie himself had seen this
same light, shining from above the castle, just as the king and
princess were taking their leave. Since that time neither had seen or
heard anything that could be supposed connected with her. Strangely
enough, however, nobody had seen her go away. If she was such an old
lady, she could hardly be supposed to have set out alone and on foot
when all the house was asleep. Still, away she must have gone, for, of
course, if she was so powerful, she would always be about the princess
to take care of her.

But as Curdie grew older, he doubted more and more whether Irene had
not been talking of some dream she had taken for reality: he had heard
it said that children could not always distinguish betwixt dreams and
actual events. At the same time there was his mother's testimony: what
was he to do with that? His mother, through whom he had learned
everything, could hardly be imagined by her own dutiful son to have
mistaken a dream for a fact of the waking world.

So he rather shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought
about it, the less he was inclined to believe it when he did think
about it, and therefore, of course, the less inclined to talk about it
to his father and mother; for although his father was one of those men
who for one word they say think twenty thoughts, Curdie was well
assured that he would rather doubt his own eyes than his wife's
testimony.

There were no others to whom he could have talked about it. The miners
were a mingled company--some good, some not so good, some rather
bad--none of them so bad or so good as they might have been; Curdie
liked most of them, and was a favourite with all; but they knew very
little about the upper world, and what might or might not take place
there. They knew silver from copper ore; they understood the
underground w