Betty was silent a moment, looking down thoughtfully at the remains of the poor battered galley which once sailed so proudly on London’s river, filled with soldiers, their armour and helmets glittering in the sunshine of long ago. There were other things in this basement hall that looked interesting, but Godmother would not let her stay to examine them.
“We will go upstairs now,” she said. So up the narrow staircase they went, into the corridor again, and thence to a room with Roman London painted over the door.
No sooner had Betty entered it than she gave a little cry and stood staring at the end wall, where a sort of picture in mosaic work was hanging, filling up its whole space.
“That was in the villa that belonged to Lucius!” she exclaimed. “I remember it quite well. It was the pavement of one of the rooms. There’s the lady riding on that funny animal’s back with the border round her, just as I saw it. Oh, Godmother! Just fancy its being here after all these years and years.”
“It is wonderful,” said Godmother. “How many of the thousands of people who every day hurry along the streets near London Bridge either know or remember that deep down under their feet lies a buried Roman city? Every now and then a fragment of it, like this one, is dug up. But there must be much, much more hidden far beneath houses and shops and roads where trams and omnibuses roll and rattle. By the way,” she added, “if you want to see the actual piece of pavement that was in the villa ‘that belonged to Lucius’ we shall have to go to the British Museum. This one is only a copy of it.”
“I shall go one day,” Betty answered. “I should like to see the very pavement I walked on. I’m luckier than any of the children in London,” she added with a little chuckle of delight.
“Now look at some of the things in these cases,” advised Godmother. “You will find them just as interesting.”
Betty obediently examined the contents of one of the glass boxes the room contained, and soon found occasion for a fresh excitement. On a label beside a collection of battered coins, she read: Found in the river bed near the present London Bridge. Instantly a scene rose in her mind of a little fair-haired girl crying and looking down through the chinks of a wooden bridge into the shining water.
“Oh, Godmother, perhaps one of them is the very coin that poor little girl dropped when her mother was so angry with her?” she cried.
“Perhaps,” said Godmother. “She dropped it one thousand five hundred years ago, and that’s about the date of this group of coins.”