“I will,” said Jack, “if you will send this boy away.”
“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?”