“Not at all,” said the gentleman. “And do let me entreat you to be very, very careful of that most valuable specimen.”
They said “Thank you” in all the different polite ways they could think of, and filed out of the door and down the stairs. Anthea was last. Half-way down to the first landing she turned and ran up again.
The door was still open, and the learned gentleman and the mummy-case were standing opposite to each other, and both looked as though they had stood like that for years.
The gentleman started when Anthea put her hand on his arm.
“I hope you won’t be cross and say it’s not my business,” she said, “but do look at your chop! Don’t you think you ought to eat it? Father forgets his dinner sometimes when he’s writing, and Mother always says I ought to remind him if she’s not at home to do it herself, because it’s so bad to miss your regular meals. So I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind my reminding you, because you don’t seem to have anyone else to do it.”
She glanced at the mummy-case; _it_ certainly did not look as though it would ever think of reminding people of their meals.
The learned gentleman looked at her for a moment before he said—
“Thank you, my dear. It was a kindly thought. No, I haven’t anyone to remind me about things like that.”
“Yes,” he said, “it does. I’ll eat it immediately, before I forget.”
As he ate it he sighed more than once. Perhaps because the chop was nasty, perhaps because he longed for the charm which the children did not want to sell, perhaps because it was so long since anyone cared whether he ate his chops or forgot them.
Anthea caught the others at the stair-foot. They woke the Psammead, and it taught them exactly how to use the word of power, and to make the charm speak. I am not going to tell you how this is done, because you might try to do it. And for you any such trying would be almost sure to end in disappointment. Because in the first place it is a thousand million to one against your ever getting hold of the right sort of charm, and if you did, there would be hardly any chance at all of your finding a learned gentleman clever enough and kind enough to read the word for you.
The children and the Psammead crouched in a circle on the floor—in the girls’ bedroom, because in the parlour they might have been interrupted by old Nurse’s coming in to lay the cloth for tea—and the charm was put in the middle of the circle.