Now they knew that he did.
'Yes,' said Cyril; 'no more cheap return trips by carpet for us--that's a dead cert.' They were all talking about the carpet, but what they were all thinking about was the Phoenix.
The golden bird had been so kind, so friendly, so polite, so instructive--and now it had set fire to a theatre and made mother ill.
Nobody blamed the bird.

It had acted in a perfectly natural manner.

But every one saw that it must not be asked to prolong its visit.

Indeed, in plain English it must be asked to go! The four children felt like base spies and treacherous friends; and each in its mind was saying who ought not to be the one to tell the Phoenix that there could no longer be a place for it in that happy home in Camden Town.

Each child was quite sure that one of them ought to speak out in a fair and manly way, but nobody wanted to be the one.
They could not talk the whole thing over as they would have liked to do, because the Phoenix itself was in the cupboard, among the blackbeetles and the odd shoes and the broken chessmen.
But Anthea tried.
'It's very horrid.