'The King (may he live for ever!),' said the gatekeeper, 'is gone to fetch home his fourteenth wife.

Where on earth have you come from not to know that ?' 'The Queen then,' said Anthea hurriedly, and not taking any notice of the question as to where they had come from.
'The Queen,' said the gatekeeper, '(may she live for ever!) gives audience today three hours after sunrising.' 'But what are we to do till the end of the three hours ?' asked Cyril.
The gatekeeper seemed neither to know nor to care.

He appeared less interested in them than they could have thought possible.

But the man who had crossed spears with him to bar the children's way was more human.
'Let them go in and look about them,' he said.

'I'll wager my best sword they've never seen anything to come near our little--village.' He said it in the tone people use for when they call the Atlantic Ocean the 'herring pond'.
The gatekeeper hesitated.
'They're only children, after all,' said the other, who had children of his own.