lope. It bore an English stamp and a London postmark.

"Your Majesty," he said.

She did not hear or did not reply. Mr. Phillips was not used to
intimate association with royal persons. He tried another form of
address. "Your Serene Highness," he said.

The Queen looked round.

"Do you mean me?" she said.

"Yes, your Excellency," said Phillips.

The Queen laughed aloud. The sound of his voice and her own, the ready
merriment of her laughter, awoke her from the fear and reverence,
scattered the vague feeling of mystery which hung over her.

"Don't you do it," she said. "I'm queen of this island right enough,
but I don't mean to spend the rest of my life walking on stilts. I'm
not that kind of queen. I'm a genuine democrat all the time. Don't you
forget that. Now call me Miss Daisy, same as you used to on board."

Mr. Phillips blushed.

"Miss Daisy," he said, "how long is it since the last king lived
here?"

"I don't know," she said, "and I don't care. Centuries and centuries,
I expect. Come and explore, I want to see the whole of the palace and
let the light and air into every room."

She had shaken off entirely all vestiges of the sense of oppression
which had come on her when she first breathed the heavy stale air of
the hall and saw it with its decayed furniture, huge and dim before
her. It was full of sunlight now and she was merry again in the
sunlight and fresh air.

She ran from room to room, pulling shutters back, flinging wide the
windows. Phillips followed her, listened to her while she planned
these for her father's rooms, those for her own, how breakfast should
be laid on summer mornings on a balcony right over the water, how
midday meals should be eaten in a shaded portico.

"And this," she said, "shall be your room, for you're to spend all
your holidays here. See, if you open the window you can take a header
right into the blue water--Oh, isn't it a beautiful colour?--and have
a morning swim."

Phillips was ready to take a header from any window at the Queen's
command. He would ask nothing better than to spend, not holidays only,
but all his days there on the island with her. If he could enter her
service--he wondered whether the Queen of Salissa would start a Royal
Navy of her own.

They passed from room to room. They ran up winding staircases and
emerged in tiny turret chambers, glass enclosed like the tops of
lighthouses. They found a roof garden set round with huge stone urns
full o