'Hail, whoever you are!' said the Pretenderette very sulkily.
'I hail,' said Caesar, 'your courage.'
Philip and Lucy looked at each other. Yes, the Pretenderette had courage: they had not thought of that before. All the attempts she had made against them—she alone in a strange land—yes, these needed courage.
'And I demand to know how you came here?'
'When I found he'd been at his building again,' she said, pointing a contemptuous thumb at Philip, 'I was just going to pull it down, and I knocked down a brick or two with my sleeve, and not thinking what I was doing I built them up again; and then I got a bit giddy and the whole thing seemed to begin to grow—candlesticks and bricks and dominoes and everything, bigger and bigger and bigger, and I looked in. It was as big as a church by this time, and I saw that boy losing his way among the candlestick pillars, and I followed him and I listened. And I thought I could be as good a Deliverer as anybody else. And the motor veil that I was going to catch the 2.37 train in was a fine disguise.'
'You tried to injure the children,' Caesar reminded her.
'I don't want to say anything to make you let me off,' said the Pretenderette, 'but at the beginning I didn't think any of it was real. I thought it was a dream. You can let your evil passions go in a dream and it don't hurt any one.'
'It hurts you,' Caesar said.
'Oh! that's no odds,' said the Pretenderette scornfully.
'You sought to injure and confound the children at every turn,' said Caesar, 'even when you found that things were real.'