e man next to him. 'Look at your own
silly legs; and where's your boots?'

'I never come out like this, I'll take my sacred,' said the
bootlace-seller. 'I wasn't quite myself last night, I'll own, but not to
dress up like a circus.'

The crowd was all talking at once, and getting rather angry. But no one
seemed to think of blaming the Queen.

Anthea bounded down the steps and pulled her up; the others followed,
and the door was shut. 'Blowed if I can make it out!' they heard. 'I'm
off home, I am.'

And the crowd, coming slowly to the same mind, dispersed, followed by
another crowd of persons who were not dressed in what the Queen thought
was the proper way.

'We shall have the police here directly,' said Anthea in the tones of
despair. 'Oh, why did you come dressed like that?'

The Queen leaned against the arm of the horse-hair sofa.

'How else can a queen dress I should like to know?' she questioned.

'Our Queen wears things like other people,' said Cyril.

'Well, I don't. And I must say,' she remarked in an injured tone, 'that
you don't seem very glad to see me now I HAVE come. But perhaps it's the
surprise that makes you behave like this. Yet you ought to be used to
surprises. The way you vanished! I shall never forget it. The best magic
I've ever seen. How did you do it?'

'Oh, never mind about that now,' said Robert. 'You see you've gone and
upset all those people, and I expect they'll fetch the police. And we
don't want to see you collared and put in prison.'

'You can't put queens in prison,' she said loftily. 'Oh, can't you?'
said Cyril. 'We cut off a king's head here once.'

'In this miserable room? How frightfully interesting.'

'No, no, not in this room; in history.'

'Oh, in THAT,' said the Queen disparagingly. 'I thought you'd done it
with your own hands.'

The girls shuddered.

'What a hideous city yours is,' the Queen went on pleasantly, 'and what
horrid, ignorant people. Do you know they actually can't understand a
single word I say.'

'Can you understand them?' asked Jane.

'Of course not; they speak some vulgar, Northern dialect. I can
understand YOU quite well.'

I really am not going to explain AGAIN how it was that the children
could understand other languages than their own so thoroughly, and talk
them, too, so that it felt and sounded (to them) just as though they
were talking English.

'Well,' said Cyril bluntly, 'now you've seen just how horrid it is,
don't you think y