s time, and I saw that boy losing his way among the
candlestick pillars, and I followed him and I listened. And I thought I
could be as good a Deliverer as anybody else. And the motor veil that I
was going to catch the 2.37 train in was a fine disguise.'

'You tried to injure the children,' Caesar reminded her.

'I don't want to say anything to make you let me off,' said the
Pretenderette, 'but at the beginning I didn't think any of it was real.
I thought it was a dream. You can let your evil passions go in a dream
and it don't hurt any one.'

'It hurts you,' Caesar said.

'Oh! that's no odds,' said the Pretenderette scornfully.

'You sought to injure and confound the children at every turn,' said
Caesar, 'even when you found that things were real.'

'I saw there was a chance of being Queen,' said the Pretenderette, 'and
I took it. Seems to me you've no occasion to talk if you're Julius
Caesar, the same as the bust in the library. You took what you could get
right enough in your time, when all's said and done.'

'I hail,' said Caesar again, 'your courage.'

'You needn't trouble,' she said, tossing her head; 'my game's up now,
and I'll speak my mind if I die for it. You don't understand. You've
never been a servant, to see other people get all the fat and you all
the bones. What you think it's like to know if you'd just been born in a
gentleman's mansion instead of in a model workman's dwelling you'd have
been brought up as a young lady and had the openwork silk stockings and
the lace on your under-petticoats.'

'You go too deep for me,' said Caesar, with the ghost of a smile. 'I now
pronounce your sentence. But life has pronounced on you a sentence worse
than any I can give you. Nobody loves you.'

'Oh, you old silly,' said the Pretenderette in a burst of angry tears,
'don't you see that's just why everything's happened?'

'You are condemned,' said Caesar calmly, 'to make yourself beloved. You
will be taken to Briskford, where you will teach the Great Sloth to like
his work and keep him awake for eight play-hours a day. In the intervals
of your toil you must try to get fond of some one. The Halma people are
kind and gentle. You will not find them hard to love. And when the Great
Sloth loves his work and the Halma people are so fond of you that they
feel they cannot bear to lose you, your penance will be over and you can
go where you will.'

'You know well enough,' said the Pretenderette, still tearful and