“A dream?” repeated Caesar. “What is a dream?”
“Not it,” said Cyril, “it’s a sort of magic. We come out of another time and another place.”
“And we want to ask you not to trouble about conquering Britain,” said Anthea; “it’s a poor little place, not worth bothering about.”
“Are you from Britain?” the General asked. “Your clothes are uncouth, but well woven, and your hair is short as the hair of Roman citizens, not long like the hair of barbarians, yet such I deem you to be.”
“We’re not,” said Jane with angry eagerness; “we’re not barbarians at all. We come from the country where the sun never sets, and we’ve read about you in books; and our country’s full of fine things—St Paul’s, and the Tower of London, and Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, and—”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Robert in a bitter undertone.
Caesar looked at the children a moment in silence. Then he called a soldier and spoke with him apart. Then he said aloud—
“You three elder children may go where you will within the camp. Few children are privileged to see the camp of Caesar. The student and the smaller girl-child will remain here with me.”
Nobody liked this; but when Caesar said a thing that thing was so, and there was an end to it. So the three went.
Left alone with Jane and the learned gentleman, the great Roman found it easy enough to turn them inside out. But it was not easy, even for him, to make head or tail of the insides of their minds when he had got at them.
The learned gentleman insisted that the whole thing was a dream, and refused to talk much, on the ground that if he did he would wake up.
Jane, closely questioned, was full of information about railways, electric lights, balloons, men-of-war, cannons, and dynamite.
“And do they fight with swords?” asked the General.
“You fire them,” said Jane, “and they go bang, and people fall down dead.”
“But Robert has a toy one in his pocket,” she said. So the others were recalled.
The boys explained the pistol to Caesar very fully, and he looked at it with the greatest interest. It was a two-shilling pistol, the one that had done such good service in the old Egyptian village.
“I shall cause guns to be made,” said Caesar, “and you will be detained till I know whether you have spoken the truth. I had just decided that Britain was not worth the bother of invading. But what you tell me decides me that it is very much worth while.”