"You're sure the Lamb's all right?" asked Jane anxiously.
"Right as ninepence, if you don't come unsettling of him. I thought you'd like to be rid of him for to-day; but take him, if you want him, for gracious' sake."
"No, no," they said, and hastened away. They would have to defend the castle presently, and the Lamb was safer even suspended in mid air in an invisible kitchen than in the guard-room of the besieged castle. They went through the first doorway they came to, and sat down helplessly on a wooden bench that ran along the room inside.
"How awful!" said Anthea and Jane together; and Jane added, "I feel as if I was in a lunatic asylum."
"What does it mean?" Anthea said. "It's creepy; I don't like it. I wish we'd wished for something plain—a rocking-horse, or a donkey, or something."
"It's no use wishing now," said Robert bitterly; and Cyril said—
"Do be quiet; I want to think."
He buried his face in his hands, and the others looked about them. They were in a long room with an arched roof. There were wooden tables along it, and one across at the end of the room, on a sort of raised platform. The room was very dim and dark. The floor was strewn with dry things like sticks, and they did not smell nice.
Cyril sat up suddenly and said—
"Look here—it's all right. I think it's like this. You know, we wished that the servants shouldn't notice any difference when we got wishes. And nothing happens to the Lamb unless we specially wish it to. So of course they don't notice the castle or anything. But then the castle is on the same place where our house was—is, I mean—and the servants have to go on being in the house, or else they would notice. But you can't have a castle mixed up with our house—and so we can't see the house, because we see the castle; and they can't see the castle, because they go on seeing the house; and so"—