Abraham Merritt

“ Our women are as you see them. Like Yolara or like those black-haired two who served you." He hesitated. "And there is a third; but only one."
Larry leaned forward eagerly.
"Brown-haired with glints of ruddy bronze, golden eyed, and lovely as a dream, with slender, beautiful hands?" he cried.
"Where saw you her?" interrupted the dwarf, starting to his feet.
"Saw her?" Larry recovered himself. "Nay, Rador, perhaps I only dreamed that there was such a woman."
"See to it, then, that you tell not your dream to Yolara," said the dwarf grimly. ”

“ Larry the most of it. I lack nearly a foot of his height, my eyes are spectacled.
Their wistfulness fled; they laughed with little gleams of milky teeth—the laughter of careless youth—and Larry laughed with them. The green dwarf regarded all with his malice-tipped smile.
"Food and drink," he ordered.
They dropped back through the curtains.
"Do you like them?" he asked us.
"Some cuties!" said Larry. "They delight the heart," he translated for Rador.
The green dwarf's next remark made me gasp. "They are yours," he said. ”

“ The Black Precipices of Doul are hard to pass, but none can pass through the feathered serpents. And there is the Sea of Crimson where—" he stopped abruptly, drank and set down his flagon empty. Whatever the purple drink might be, it was loosening the green dwarf's tongue and' neither of us cared to interrupt him.
"It is strange, strange indeed to be sitting with two who have newly come from that land that we were forced from so many sais of laya agone," he began again, half musingly, gone upon another tangent. "For we too came from your world, but how long, long ago! ”