. No; I
don't want the egg, dear. I'll go to sleep again, I think. Don't you
worry. And tell cook not to bother me about meals. You can order what
you like for lunch.'

Anthea closed the door very mousily, and instantly went downstairs and
ordered what she liked for lunch. She ordered a pair of turkeys, a large
plum-pudding, cheese-cakes, and almonds and raisins.

Cook told her to go along, do. And she might as well not have ordered
anything, for when lunch came it was just hashed mutton and semolina
pudding, and cook had forgotten the sippets for the mutton hash and the
semolina pudding was burnt.

When Anthea rejoined the others she found them all plunged in the gloom
where she was herself. For every one knew that the days of the carpet
were now numbered. Indeed, so worn was it that you could almost have
numbered its threads.

So that now, after nearly a month of magic happenings, the time was at
hand when life would have to go on in the dull, ordinary way and Jane,
Robert, Anthea, and Cyril would be just in the same position as the
other children who live in Camden Town, the children whom these four had
so often pitied, and perhaps a little despised.

'We shall be just like them,' Cyril said.

'Except,' said Robert, 'that we shall have more things to remember and
be sorry we haven't got.'

'Mother's going to send away the carpet as soon as she's well enough to
see about that coconut matting. Fancy us with coconut-matting--us! And
we've walked under live coconut-trees on the island where you can't have
whooping-cough.'

'Pretty island,' said the Lamb; 'paint-box sands and sea all shiny
sparkly.'

His brothers and sisters had often wondered whether he remembered that
island. Now they knew that he did.

'Yes,' said Cyril; 'no more cheap return trips by carpet for us--that's
a dead cert.'

They were all talking about the carpet, but what they were all thinking
about was the Phoenix.

The golden bird had been so kind, so friendly, so polite, so
instructive--and now it had set fire to a theatre and made mother ill.

Nobody blamed the bird. It had acted in a perfectly natural manner. But
every one saw that it must not be asked to prolong its visit. Indeed, in
plain English it must be asked to go!

The four children felt like base spies and treacherous friends; and each
in its mind was saying who ought not to be the one to tell the Phoenix
that there could no longer be a place for it in that happy home in