Now DO let us go. There's a good, kind,
honourable clergyman.'
'I don't know,' said the Reverend Septimus; 'it's a difficult
problem. It is such a very unusual dream. Perhaps it's only a
sort of other life--quite real enough for you to be mad in. And if
you're mad, there might be a dream-asylum where you'd be kindly
treated, and in time restored, cured, to your sorrowing relatives.
It is very hard to see your duty plainly, even in ordinary life,
and these dream-circumstances are so complicated--'
'If it's a dream,' said Robert, 'you will wake up directly, and
then you'd be sorry if you'd sent us into a dream-asylum, because
you might never get into the same dream again and let us out, and
so we might stay there for ever, and then what about our sorrowing
relatives who aren't in the dreams at all?'
But all the curate could now say was, 'Oh, my head!'
And Jane and Robert felt quite ill with helplessness and
hopelessness. A really conscientious curate is a very difficult
thing to manage.
And then, just as the hopelessness and the helplessness were
getting to be almost more than they could bear, the two children
suddenly felt that extraordinary shrinking feeling that you always
have when you are just going to vanish. And the next moment they
had vanished, and the Reverend Septimus was left alone with his
aunts.
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