In the middle of the village there was a hedge that enclosed what seemed to be a piece of ground about as big as their own garden in Camden Town. No sooner were the children well within the inner thorn hedge than dozens of men and women and children came crowding round from behind and inside the huts. The girl stood protectingly in front of the four children, and said— “They are wonder-children from beyond the desert. They bring marvellous gifts, and I have said that it is peace between us and them.” She held out her arm with the Lowther Arcade bangle on it. The children from London, where nothing now surprises anyone, had never before seen so many people look so astonished. They crowded round the children, touching their clothes, their shoes, the buttons on the boys’ jackets, and the coral of the girls’ necklaces. “Do say something,” whispered Anthea. “We come,” said Cyril, with some dim remembrance of a dreadful day when he had had to wait in an outer office while his father interviewed a solicitor, and there had been nothing to read but the _Daily Telegraph_—“we come from the world where the sun never sets. And peace with honour is what we want. We are the great Anglo-Saxon or conquering race. Not that we want to conquer _you_,” he added hastily. “We only want to look at your houses and your—well, at all you’ve got here, and then we shall return to our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so that your name may be famed.” Cyril’s speech didn’t keep the crowd from pressing round and looking as eagerly as ever at the clothing of the children. Anthea had an idea that these people had never seen woven stuff before, and she saw how wonderful and strange it must seem to people who had never had any clothes but the skins of beasts. The sewing, too, of modern clothes seemed to astonish them very much. They must have been able to sew themselves, by the way, for men who seemed to be the chiefs wore knickerbockers of goat-skin or deer-skin, fastened round the waist with twisted strips of hide. And the women wore long skimpy skirts of animals’ skins. The people were not very tall, their hair was fair, and men and women both had it short. Their eyes were blue, and that seemed odd in Egypt. Most of them were tattooed like sailors, only more roughly. “What is this? What is this?” they kept asking touching the children’s clothes curiously. Anthea hastily took off Jane’s frilly lace collar and handed it to the woman who seemed most friendly. “Take this,” she said, “and look at it. And leave us alone. We want to talk among ourselves.” She spoke in the tone of authority which she had always found successful when she had not time to coax her baby brother to do as he was told. The tone was just as successful now. The children were left together and the crowd retreated. It paused a dozen yards away to look at the lace collar and to go on talking as hard as it could.