"Oh, mummie!" gasped Georgina with rapture, "how _lovely_!" This was a party, and no mistake. "Can I sleep in Mr. Mainwaring's cabin?" "And can I sleep in Mr. Standish's cabin?" echoed Jane earnestly. "And we needn't go to bed for hours and hours, need we?" chimed in Cornelius James. "Where are they to sleep?" asked the Captain's wife, turning to the Torpedo Lieutenant with laughter still in her eyes. "I never thought of that. One always has spare rooms in a house, but a battleship is so different. . . ." "It's all right," he replied. "I've arranged all that. There are a lot of people ashore: the children can use their cabins, and some of us can sling in cots for the night. They'll have to wear our pyjamas. . . . But I don't know about baths----" "I think they must have plenary absolution from the tub to-night." She glanced at the tiny watch at her wrist. "Now then, children, half an hour before bed time: one good romp. What shall we play?" "Oranges and lemons," said Georgina promptly, and seized the Indiarubber Man's hand. "I don't know the words," replied her partner plaintively; "I only 'knows the toon,'" as the leadsman said to the Navigator. So the children supplied the words to the men's bass accompaniment; the Captain and his wife linked hands. The candle came to light them to bed; the chopper came to chop off a head; and at the end a grand tug-of-war terminated with two squealing heaps of humanity in miniature subsiding on top of the Young Doctor and the A.P. Then they played "Hunt the slipper," at which Torps, with his long arms, greatly distinguished himself, and "Hide the thimble," at which Double-O Gerrard, blinking through his glasses straight at the quarry without seeing it, was hopelessly disgraced. "General Post" and "Kiss in the Ring" followed, and quite suddenly the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James decreed it was time for bed, and the best game of all began. The Captain's wife gathered six pairs of vasty pyjamas over her arm. "I'll take the girls all together and look after them in my husband's cabin," she said. "We'll come along when we're ready. Will you all look after the boys?" Freckles fell to the lot of the Junior Watchkeeper; David, specialist in raspberry puffs, had already attached himself to the Indiarubber Man. The A.P. found himself leading off a young gentleman with an air-gun which he earnestly desired as a bed-fellow. The remaining two, red-headed twins who had spent most of the afternoon locked in combat, were in charge of Torps and the Young Doctor.