“It can’t!” said Anthea stoutly, “the present’s the present and the past’s the past.”
“Not always,” said Cyril.
“When we were in the Past the present was the future. Now then!” he added triumphantly.
And Anthea could not deny it.
“I should have liked to see more of the camp,” said Robert.
“Yes, we didn’t get much for our money—but Imogen is happy, that’s one thing,” said Anthea. “We left her happy in the Past. I’ve often seen about people being happy in the Past, in poetry books. I see what it means now.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” said the Psammead sleepily, putting its head out of its bag and taking it in again suddenly, “being left in the Past.”
Everyone remembered this afterwards, when—
CHAPTER XI.
BEFORE PHARAOH
It was the day after the adventure of Julius Caesar and the Little Black Girl that Cyril, bursting into the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner (you have no idea how dirty they were, for he had been playing shipwrecked mariners all the morning on the leads at the back of the house, where the water-cistern is), found Anthea leaning her elbows on the edge of the bath, and crying steadily into it.