‘Send for the police,’ said Miss Selina.
‘Send for a doctor,’ said the curate.
‘Do you think they ARE mad, then,’ said Miss Amelia.
‘I think I am,’ said the curate.
Jane had been crying ever since her capture. Now she said— ‘You aren’t now, but perhaps you will be, if—And it would serve you jolly well right, too.’
‘Aunt Selina,’ said the curate, ‘and Aunt Amelia, believe me, this is only an insane dream. You will realize it soon. It has happened to me before. But do not let us be unjust, even in a dream. Do not hold the children; they have done no harm. As I said before, it was I who opened the box.’
The strong, bony hands unwillingly loosened their grasp. Robert shook himself and stood in sulky resentment. But Jane ran to the curate and embraced him so suddenly that he had not time to defend himself.
‘You’re a dear,’ she said. ‘It IS like a dream just at first, but you get used to it. Now DO let us go. There’s a good, kind, honourable clergyman.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Reverend Septimus; ‘it’s a difficult problem. It is such a very unusual dream. Perhaps it’s only a sort of other life—quite real enough for you to be mad in. And if you’re mad, there might be a dream-asylum where you’d be kindly treated, and in time restored, cured, to your sorrowing relatives. It is very hard to see your duty plainly, even in ordinary life, and these dream-circumstances are so complicated—’
‘If it’s a dream,’ said Robert, ‘you will wake up directly, and then you’d be sorry if you’d sent us into a dream-asylum, because you might never get into the same dream again and let us out, and so we might stay there for ever, and then what about our sorrowing relatives who aren’t in the dreams at all?’