everently among the bright folds of her
gown.

'You shall teach me later to say the great names,' she said. 'And the
names of their Ministers--perhaps the great Nisroch is one of them?'

'I don't think so,' said Cyril. 'Mr Campbell Bannerman's Prime Minister
and Mr Burns a Minister, and so is the Archbishop of Canterbury, I
think, but I'm not sure--and Dr Parker was one, I know, and--'

'No more,' said the Queen, putting her hands to her ears. 'My head's
going round with all those great names. You shall teach them to me
later--because of course you'll make us a nice long visit now you have
come, won't you? Now tell me--but no, I am quite tired out with your
being so clever. Besides, I'm sure you'd like ME to tell YOU something,
wouldn't you?'

'Yes,' said Anthea. 'I want to know how it is that the King has gone--'

'Excuse me, but you should say "the King may-he-live-for-ever",' said
the Queen gently.

'I beg your pardon,' Anthea hastened to say--'the King
may-he-live-for-ever has gone to fetch home his fourteenth wife? I don't
think even Bluebeard had as many as that. And, besides, he hasn't killed
YOU at any rate.'

The Queen looked bewildered.

'She means,' explained Robert, 'that English kings only have one
wife--at least, Henry the Eighth had seven or eight, but not all at
once.'

'In our country,' said the Queen scornfully, 'a king would not reign
a day who had only one wife. No one would respect him, and quite right
too.'

'Then are all the other thirteen alive?' asked Anthea.

'Of course they are--poor mean-spirited things! I don't associate with
them, of course, I am the Queen: they're only the wives.'

'I see,' said Anthea, gasping.

'But oh, my dears,' the Queen went on, 'such a to-do as there's been
about this last wife! You never did! It really was TOO funny. We wanted
an Egyptian princess. The King may-he-live-for-ever has got a wife from
most of the important nations, and he had set his heart on an Egyptian
one to complete his collection. Well, of course, to begin with, we
sent a handsome present of gold. The Egyptian king sent back some
horses--quite a few; he's fearfully stingy!--and he said he liked the
gold very much, but what they were really short of was lapis lazuli, so
of course we sent him some. But by that time he'd begun to use the gold
to cover the beams of the roof of the Temple of the Sun-God, and he
hadn't nearly enough to finish the job, so we sent some more. And so it
we