"

"How can I?" answered Mopsa, surprised. "Don't you know what happened
when the door closed? Has nobody told you?"

"I did not see any one after I got into the place," said Jack. "There
was no one to tell anything,--not even a fawn, nor the brown doe. I
have only seen down here these fairy people, and this boy, and this
lady."

"The lady is the brown doe," answered Mopsa; "and this boy and the
fairies were the fawns." Jack was so astonished at this that he stared
at the lady and the boy and the fairies with all his might.

"The sun came shining in as I stepped inside," said Mopsa, "and a long
beam fell down from the fairy dome across my feet. Do you remember
what the apple-woman told us,--how it was reported that the brown doe
and her nation had a queen whom they shut up, and never let the sun
shine on her? That was not a kind or true report, and yet it came from
something that really happened."

"Yes, I remember," said Jack; "and if the sun did shine they were all
to be turned into deer."

"I dare not tell you all that story yet," said Mopsa; "but, Jack, as
the brown doe and all the fawns came up to greet me, and passed by
turns into the sunbeam, they took their own forms, every one of them,
because the spell was broken. They were to remain in the disguise of
deer till a queen of alien birth should come to them against her will.
I am a queen of alien birth, and did not I come against my will?"

"Yes, to be sure," answered Jack. "We thought all the time that we
were running away."

"If ever you come to Fairyland again," observed Mopsa, "you can save
yourself the trouble of trying to run away from the old mother."

"I shall not 'come,'" answered Jack, "because I shall not go,--not for
a long while, at least. But the boy,--I want to know why this boy
turned into another ME?"

"Because he is the heir, of course," answered Mopsa.

"But I don't see that this is any reason at all," said Jack.

Mopsa laughed. "That's because you don't know how to argue," she
replied. "Why, the thing is as plain as possible."

"It may be plain to you," persisted Jack, "but it's no reason."

"No reason!" repeated Mopsa, "no reason! when I like you the best of
anything in the world, and when I am come here to be queen? Of course,
when the spell was broken he took exactly your form on that account;
and very right too."

"But why?" asked Jack.

Mopsa, however, was like other fairies in this respect,--that she knew
all about O