Jane with trembling hands held up the charm towards the East, and Cyril spoke the word of power. The Amulet grew to a great arch. Out beyond it was the glaring Egyptian sky, the broken wall, the cruel, dark, big-nosed face with the red, wet knife in its gleaming teeth. Within the arch was the dull, faint, greeny-brown of London grass and trees.
“Hold tight, Jane!” Cyril cried, and he dashed through the arch, dragging Anthea and the Psammead after him. Robert followed, clutching Jane. And in the ears of each, as they passed through the arch of the charm, the sound and fury of battle died out suddenly and utterly, and they heard only the low, dull, discontented hum of vast London, and the peeking and patting of the sparrows on the gravel and the voices of the ragged baby children playing Ring-o’-Roses on the yellow trampled grass. And the charm was a little charm again in Jane’s hand, and there was the basket with their dinner and the bathbuns lying just where they had left it.
“My hat!” said Cyril, drawing a long breath; “that was something like an adventure.”
“It was rather like one, certainly,” said the Psammead.
They all lay still, breathing in the safe, quiet air of Regent’s Park.
“We’d better go home at once,” said Anthea presently. “Old Nurse will be most frightfully anxious. The sun looks about the same as it did when we started yesterday. We’ve been away twenty-four hours.”
“The buns are quite soft still,” said Cyril, feeling one; “I suppose the dew kept them fresh.”
They picked up the dinner-basket and the Psammead-basket, and went straight home.
“Well, if ever I did!” she said. “What’s gone wrong? You’ve soon tired of your picnic.”
The children took this to be bitter irony, which means saying the exact opposite of what you mean in order to make yourself disagreeable; as when you happen to have a dirty face, and someone says, “How nice and clean you look!”
“We’re very sorry,” began Anthea, but old Nurse said—
“Oh, bless me, child, I don’t care! Please yourselves and you’ll please me. Come in and get your dinners comf’table. I’ve got a potato on a-boiling.”
When she had gone to attend to the potatoes the children looked at each other. Could it be that old Nurse had so changed that she no longer cared that they should have been away from home for twenty-four hours—all night in fact—without any explanation whatever?