were not hungry, curiously enough.

They picked up the dinner-basket and the Psammead-basket, and went
straight home.

Old Nurse met them with amazement.

'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?

But the Psammead put its head out of its basket and said--

'What's the matter? Don't you understand? You come back through the
charm-arch at the same time as you go through it. This isn't tomorrow!'
'Is it still yesterday?' asked Jane.

'No, it's today. The same as it's always been. It wouldn't do to go
mixing up the present and the Past, and cutting bits out of one to fit
into the other.'

'Then all that adventure took no time at all?'

'You can call it that if you like,' said the Psammead. 'It took none of
the modern time, anyhow.'

That evening Anthea carried up a steak for the learned gentleman's
dinner. She persuaded Beatrice, the maid-of-all-work, who had given her
the bangle with the blue stone, to let her do it. And she stayed and
talked to him, by special invitation, while he ate the dinner.

She told him the whole adventure, beginning with--

'This afternoon we found ourselves on the bank of the River Nile,' and
ending up with, 'And then we remembered how to get back, and there we
were in Regent's Park, and it hadn't taken any time at all.'

She did not tell anything about the charm or the Psammead, because that
was forbidden, but the story was quite wonderful enough even as it was
to entrance the learned gentleman.

'You are a most unusual little girl,' he said. 'Who tells you all these
things?'

'No one,' said Anthea, 'they just happen.'

'Make-believe,' he said slowly, as one who recalls and pronounces a
long-forgotten word.

He sat long after she had l