"I'm sure I don't care," the Queen answered; "I'm not going back. Good-bye."
And she suddenly flew straight up into the air and away over the housetops, and the last sight she had of them showed them, with their faces upturned towards her, gazing in dumb astonishment, the leader still on his knees and the honey-cake maker on his back in the street.
The beggar had long since slunk round a corner and disappeared.
So the Queen rose to quite a great height in the air.
"I shall go right away from the town," she said "The smoke is so choking up here above the roofs. However people can live down there I can't make out."
So she went right up into the blue sky and made her way towards where, at the skirts of the town, the mountains rose steep and frowning.
Up there, standing on the mountain's crest, she had a glorious view of sea and sky and town and country.
The sea threw back the deep blue of the sky above, and the white wave-horses flecked its surface, and the ships passed silently far out at sea; down below her feet, it beat against the rocky base of the cliff, and in and out amongst the spray the seagulls flew like a white cloud.
The town lay in a narrow valley, broad at the sea face, and running inwards into narrowness between grey, grand hills, right to where it disappeared in the windings of the pass. Down below, in the harbour, she could see the boats getting ready for sea.
"Oh, how wonderful!" the Queen said; "and it all belongs to me—at least, so they say—though I can't quite see what good it does me, for I can't be everywhere at once. And I can't even make the hills move or the sea heave its breast; so that I can't see that it does me any more good than any one else, because it isn't even constitutional for me to be here. I ought to be down there in the palace garden, seeing nothing at all. However, it's very lovely here, so I mustn't grumble. I wonder how the bat is getting on, and the Regent, and all."