As time went on it grew so perilously easy to be deceitful! No one thought of doubting them—no one thought of asking what they did when they were left alone.

Day after day, as nurse's toiling figure disappeared up the wooden steps on to the cliff, Dash and Dot burst round the corner of the rocks, and almost without a word spoken, Susie's shoes and stockings were flung to the winds, and she was scampering at headlong speed from pool to pool, with Tom at her heels—like a wild creature, and in a condition that would have fairly horrified poor nurse, who held that all well-conducted young ladies, like the Queen of Spain, should have no visible legs!

Really, in her heart, Susie did not like the twins so very much. They were wild and unkempt, and very boisterous; their twinkling black eyes radiated mischief, but it was the sort of mischief that bewildered Susie and rather frightened her. Nurse puzzled over her mangled stockings and the hideous rents in her skirts, and Mrs. Beauchamp's patient fingers grew stiff with darning; but whilst Susie flew about the rocks, careless and dishevelled, she always forgot how sorry she was going to be afterwards, and how uncomfortable her conscience was at night.

"I really won't go again," she said to herself time after time; and yet the first sight of the twins splashing round the rocks scattered all her good resolutions to the winds.

"I am glad I can trust you," her mother often said. "You are a comfort to me."

"Troublesome comforts I should call them," nurse said; and, like many of nurse's wise sayings, it was remembered by Susie, and left a little sting in her memory.

This afternoon she came to the beach quite resolved to withstand temptation, and to play demurely with the little ones. It had rained all morning, and now Tom had gone to the town with his mother to buy some new sand-shoes. For some time Susie was perfectly happy building castles of sand and letting the rising tide flow into her moat. Nurse was indulgent enough to waste a few of her valuable minutes in making a scarlet flag and mounting it on a wooden knitting-pin, whilst Dick and Amy busily ornamented its base with fan shells. Dick was the king, with Alick for his knight—rather a top-heavy knight, with wayward legs—and Susie and Amy were the besieging army, fighting with desperate courage as long as they had breath.

Susie flung herself panting on the sand. "Isn't it funny, nurse," she said, "that all the bad men were good kings, and all the good men had to be beheaded?"

"I don't know much about any king, Miss Susie," said nurse, "except King Henry the Eighth, and his beheading was on the other side. He was a bad man if you like, and I never had any patience with him."

"Oh, I forgot him," said Susie; "and I wouldn't say that King Edward was a bad man exactly, though he is a good king; but he isn't what you would call prime, is he?"

"Oh no, my dear, not prime," said nurse.

"And Charles the Second wasn't prime either," said Susie.

"I don't know about him, my dear," said nurse. "But to go back to King Henry. I always felt very much for poor Annie Bullen. A monster of iniquity I call him, dressed up in his ermine and fallals, and not a policeman or a judge daring to say him nay."

"How nice it is that common gentlemen don't behave like kings!" said Amy. "If I was a queen, I would throw my crown away when it was time for my beheadal."

"No, you'd cry," said Dick solemnly.

"I wouldn't," said Susie. "I'd march proudly out with my lovely hair floating in the wind, and my swannish neck rising out of a black velvet dress, and I'd stand on the block and say, 'I will my limbs—that means my legs and arms—to the four quarters of the country, and my heart to the tyrant who broke it.'"

"Much he'd want it," said Tom disdainfully.

But Susie stood declaiming on the sand-hill, inspired by her own eloquence, and gazed at with admiration by Amy for a courage she could not match.

"O Susie, how brave you are!" she said. "They'd have to kill you to get at it; you couldn't get at your heart till you were dead. I don't believe I could ever be as brave as that. I know I should cry."

"It's called weep, my dear," said nurse, "when it's done by kings and queens."

"Well, I should weep," said Amy. "And I make my wills quite differently to Susie. I made a will this morning when it rained. You know you said you were going to give me a paint-box on my birthday, nursie! Well, if I live till my birthday, I'm going to leave it back to you in my will."

"You needn't trouble, Miss Amy," said nurse, "because if you don't live till your birthday I can keep it."

"But that wouldn't be my will," said Amy, puzzled.

"But it would be your wish, my dear, which comes to the same thing."

"Well, mine would be my will, but it wouldn't be my wish," said Susie. "It would be history, and things in history are never so bad as things that happen to yourself."

"But it would happen to yourself if it was your legs and arms you gave away," said Amy.

"And I dare say it was just as bad to have your head cut off a hundred years ago as it would be to-day," said nurse—"I mean for the people themselves."

"Do you think," said Susie, "that the Jews and people who had their teeth pulled out by the king for fun felt it just as much as we do when we go to the dentist?"

"For fun!" said Dick, in a horrified voice.

"Did they have gas?" said Amy.

"Gas!" said Susie, with a superior smile. "How silly you are, Amy! They had no gas then—only candles, or perhaps lamps. And I don't see how they could pull out teeth with lamps; do you?"

"No," said Amy, in a small, mortified voice.

"I daresay," nurse went on, as if there had been no interruption, "that it would have been easier for Miss Susie to have been brave in a history book than if the trial came to her here."

"I don't see why," argued Susie.

"Well, we are made so," said nurse. "Other people's trials are a deal easier to bear than our own. Now you've been good children to-day, and I'll make a surprise for tea as a reward. I'm going to leave you Master Dick for an hour, Miss Susie; and you'll look after him well, and when I wave you'll bring him in. Don't sit down any longer, but have a bit of play on the sand; it's getting chilly, and it looks like more rain."

"All right," said Susie.

She was filled with light-hearted joy, and nurse's praise warmed her heart; nurse so seldom praised her. She helped Alick's wilful legs to the foot of the steps and watched him out of sight.

"I am so very glad I have made up my mind to be good," she said to herself; "it is perfectly easy if you make up your mind. I wish the twins would come and want me to leave Dick, or go on the rocks, or do something naughty. I would just stand here and look at them with my large innocent eyes and my gentle smile, and I would say, 'Never, twins! Nurse has trusted him to me, and I have turned over a new leaf. I would not touch the rocks with my bare feet, not for a king's ransom.'"

"Susie," cried Dick.

"Yes," said Susie impatiently.

"Come here, Susie," he said again—"quick, I'm so wet!"

"Oh, bother," said Susie.

She turned slowly, still inspired by her own eloquence; and there, straight before her, as if they had walked out of the sunset, stood the twins, with black hair waving, and bare, wet legs.

"Come on!" they shouted breathlessly. "It's a perfectly heavenly afternoon for the rocks, but it's awfully late; you've kept us waiting an hour whilst your nurse simply clacked."

"All right," said Susie.

It was really all wrong, but she had forgotten her promises, her resolutions, her boasted courage. At the first demand of the enemy she laid down her weapons and surrendered the fort, and in another moment she too was flying bare-footed over the rocks, with Dick stumbling laboriously after her.

"Susie"—his shrill, faint voice pursued her—"Susie, my shoes is wet; come back!"

"Come on," cried Susie.

"My feet is tired. Susie, it's Dick."

But Susie was far ahead.

"Susie!" he called again.

Wet and miserable, he sat stolidly down upon a rock.

"If Susie leaves me I shall weep," he said out loud.