f Hereward the
Wake (who was pretty sure to emerge from under the table, and engage in
sanguinary combat, just after he had brushed his hair, and have to be
sent up to the nursery to brush it over again); now a breathless pair
would rush in, crying that they were the Princes in the Tower, and would
she please save them, for that horrid old beast of a Gloster was coming
after them just as fast as he could come. Indeed, Margaret had to make a
rule that they should be their own selves, and no one else, in the
evening when Uncle John came home, for fear of more confusion than he
would like.

"But I get so _used_ to being Richard," cried Basil, after a day of
crusader-life. "You can't do a king well if you have to keep stopping
and being a boy half the time. Don't you see that yourself, Cousin
Margaret?"

Yes, Margaret saw that, but she submitted that she liked boys, and that
it was trying for a person in private life, like herself, to live all
day in royal society, especially when royalty was so excited as the
Majesty of England was at this juncture.

"Oh, but why can't you be some one too, Cousin Margaret? I suppose Susan
D. would hate to give up being Berengaria, after you gave her that
lovely gold veil--I say, doesn't she look bul--doesn't she look pretty
in it? I never thought Susan D. would come out pretty, but it's mostly
the way you do her hair--what was I saying, Cousin Margaret? Oh, yes,
but there are other people you could be, lots and lots of them.
And--Merton doesn't half do Saladin. He keeps getting mad when I run him
through the body, and I _can't_ make him understand that I don't mean
those nasty, fat, black things in ponds, when I call him 'learned
leech,' and you know he _has_ to be the leech, it says so in the
'Talisman.' And so perhaps you would be Saladin, and he can be Sir
Kenneth, though he's too sneaky for him, too. Or else you could be the
hermit, Cousin Margaret. Oh, do be the hermit! Theodoric of Engedi, you
know, the Flail of the Desert, that's a splendid one to do. All you have
to do is keep jumping about and waving something, and crying out, 'I am
Theodoric of Engedi! I am the Flail of the Desert!' Come on, Cousin
Margaret, oh, I say, do!" And Susan D., tugging at her cousin's gown,
shouted in unison, "Oh, I say, do, Cousin Margaret!"

If any one had told Margaret Montfort, three months before this, that
she would, before the end of the summer, be capering about the garden,
waving her staff