She flounced out amid a disregarded chorus of regrets and apologies. The children were very sorry, but really it was not their faults. You can't help it if you are pouring water on a besieging foe, and your castle suddenly changes into your house - and everything changes with it except the water, and that happens to fall on somebody else's clean cap. 'I don't know why the water didn't change into nothing, though,' said Cyril. 'Why should it?' asked Robert. 'Water's water all the world over.' 'I expect the castle well was the same as ours in the stable-yard,' said Jane. And that was really the case. 'I thought we couldn't get through a wish-day without a row,' said Cyril; 'it was much too good to be true. Come on, Bobs, my military hero. If we lick into bed sharp she won't be so frumious, and perhaps she'll bong us up some supper. I'm jolly hungry! Good-night, kids.' 'Good-night. I hope the castle won't come creeping back in the night,' said Jane. 'Of course it won't,' said Anthea briskly, 'but Martha will - not in the night, but in a minute. Here, turn round, I'll get that knot out of your pinafore strings.' 'Wouldn't it have been degrading for Sir Wulfric de Talbot,' said Jane dreamily, 'if he could have known that half the besieged garrison wore pinafores?' 'And the other half knickerbockers. Yes - frightfully. Do stand still - you're only tightening the knot,' said Anthea. CHAPTER 8 BIGGER THAN THE BAKER'S BOY 'Look here,' said Cyril. 'I've got an idea.' 'Does it hurt much?' said Robert sympathetically. 'Don't be a jackape! I'm not humbugging.' 'Shut up, Bobs!' said Anthea. 'Silence for the Squirrel's oration,' said Robert. Cyril balanced himself on the edge of the water-butt in the backyard, where they all happened to be, and spoke. 'Friends, Romans, countrymen - and women - we found a Sammyadd. We have had wishes. We've had wings, and being beautiful as the day - ugh! - that was pretty jolly beastly if you like - and wealth and castles, and that rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we're no forrader. We haven't really got anything worth having for our wishes.' 'We've had things happening,' said Robert; 'that's always something.' 'It's not enough, unless they're the right things,' said Cyril firmly. 'Now I've been thinking -' 'Not really?' whispered Robert. 'In the silent what's-its-names of the night. It's like suddenly being asked something out of history - the date of the Conquest or something; you know it all right all the time, but when you're asked it all goes out of your head. Ladies and gentlemen, you know jolly well that when we're all rotting about in the usual way heaps of things keep cropping up, and then real earnest wishes come into the heads of the beholder -' 'Hear, hear!' said Robert.