“I can’t,” said Richard. “I must go back to my own time, my own place, I mean. Now I’ll go. Come on, cats.”
The cats looked imploringly at their father, but they went and stood by Richard.
“I suppose we may go?” he asked.
“Every one is perfectly free here,” said Lord Arden. “The only thing you may not do is to leave the golden plain. It is very strange. There are hardly any laws. We are all free to do as we like, and no one seems to like to do anything that hurts any one else. Only if, any one is caught trying to get into the outer world, or to let the outer world in, he is killed—without pain, and not as vengeance but as necessity.”
The white cats looked at each other rather ruefully. This was not at all the way in which they remembered their daddy’s talking to them.
“But,” said Lord Arden, “for the children and my sister we must risk it. I trust you completely, and we will be at the crevice when the moon rises.”
So Richard and his three white animals went out down steps cut in the solid rock, and the townspeople crowded round them with fruits and maize-cakes for Richard, and milk in golden platters for the cats.
And later Richard made signs of being sleepy, and they let him go away among the fields, followed by the three white creatures. And at the appointed hour they all met under the vast cliff that was the natural wall and guardian of the golden plain.
And the Mouldiwarp carried Uncle Jim up to the top, and then came back for Lord Arden and Richard. But before there was time to do more a shout went up, and a thousand torches sprang to life in the city they had left, and they knew that their flight had been discovered.
“There’s no time,” the white Bear-Mouldiwarp, to the utter astonishment of Lord Arden, opened its long mouth and spoke. And the white cats also opened their mouths and cried, “Oh, daddy, how awful! what shall we do?”