t trouble about that,' said Lucy in an off-hand manner.
'I sent the parrot off _ages_ ago.'

'And you never told me! Then I think that's quits; don't you?'

Lucy had a short struggle with herself (you know those unpleasant and
difficult struggles, I am sure!) and said:

'Right-o!'

And together they ran back to the Justice Hall.

The light was growing every moment, and there was now a sound of
movement in the city. Women came down to the public fountains to draw
water, and boys swept the paths and doorsteps. That sort of work goes on
even when barbarians are surrounding a town. And the ordinary sounds of
a town's awakening came to Lucy and Philip as they waited; crowing cocks
and barking dogs and cats mewing faintly for the morning milk. But it
was not for those sounds that Lucy and Philip were waiting.

So through those homely and familiar sounds they listened, listened,
listened; and very gradually, so that they could neither of them have
said at any moment 'Now it has begun,' yet quite beyond mistake the
sound for which they listened was presently loud in their ears. And it
was the sound of steel on steel; the sound of men shouting in the
breathless moment between sword-stroke and sword-stroke; the cry of
victory and the wail of defeat.

And, presently, the sound of feet that ran.

And now a man shot out from a side street and ran across the square
towards the Palace of Justice where Lucy and Philip were hidden in the
gallery. And now another and another all running hard and making for the
ruined hall as hunted creatures make for cover. Rough, big, blond, their
long hair flying behind them, and their tunics of beast-skins flapping
as they ran, the barbarians fled before the legions of Caesar. The great
marble-covered book that looked like a marble tomb was still open, its
cover and fifteen leaves propped up against the tall broken columns of
the gateway of the Justice Hall. Into that open book leapt the first
barbarian, leapt and vanished, and the next after him and the next, and
then, by twos and threes and sixes and sevens, they leapt in and
disappeared, amid gasping and shouting and the nearing sound of the
bucina and of the trumpets of Rome.

Then from all quarters of the city the Roman soldiers came trooping, and
as the last of the barbarians plunged headlong into the open book, the
Romans formed into ordered lines and waited, while a man might count
ten. Then, advancing between their ranks, came the s