“Perhaps they didn’t know you,” whispered Rudolf.

“They did, too,” returned his sister angrily.  “They just laughed and turned their heads the other way, horrid things!  Just wait, I’ll tell them what I think of them; but, oh, Rudolf, here come more carriages and more dolls in them, and how queerly they are dressed, these last, I mean!  I never saw any dolls like them before.  See their poke bonnets, and their fringed mantles, and their little hoop-skirts, but, oh, look, look, can that be the Queen?”

Ann’s voice sounded disappointed as well as surprised, and in her excitement she spoke so loud that Captain Jinks himself turned his threatening eye on her and called out:  “Silence!” But Ann paid no attention to him, nor did the other children; the eyes of all three were fixed upon a little figure who rode all alone at the very end of the procession.  They knew she must be the Queen by the respectful way in which Captain Jinks and the sergeant saluted, but she was very different from what they had imagined a Queen to be.  The wooden horse which she rode was not handsome, indeed one of his legs was missing, but he pranced and curvetted so proudly upon the remaining three that it seemed as if he knew he carried a Queen upon his back.  The royal lady kept her seat with perfect ease, and when she came opposite the children, she checked her steed, halted, and gazed down upon them.

“Have you forgotten me?” she said.  Then she smiled and they knew her at once.  It was the corn-cob doll!  Though she had grown so much larger and seemed so much grander, yet she looked just the same as when they had taken her out of Aunt Jane’s sandal-wood box from which, the children now remembered, certain tin soldiers and a three-legged wooden horse had also come!  The Queen still wore her flowing greeny-yellow gown, her hair was braided in two long braids that hung over her shoulders, and she carried her quaint little head high, in truly royal fashion.

Now she dismounted gracefully from her horse and came toward the children, holding out her hand.  They dared not look her in the face.  They were all three ashamed to speak to her, and especially Rudolf who remembered only too clearly all the unkind things he had said about the corn-cob doll, and how very, very near he had come to roasting her over the nursery fire!  Whatever would happen, thought he, if any of her subjects who seemed to stand in such awe of her, should find out that attempt on their Queen’s life?  Captain Jinks would probably think imprisonment on bread and water entirely too good for him, probably it would be slow torture.

“Answer her majesty,” muttered the captain in his ear, “or I’ll have your head cut off!”

Still Rudolf, blushing fiery red, and not knowing what to say, continued to stare down at his toes.  Peter put his thumb in his mouth, Ann hung down her head; neither of them was any better off.