Peace reigned once more at Fernley House; peace and cheerfulness, and much joy. It was not the same peace as of old, when Margaret and her uncle lived their quiet tete-a-tete life, and nothing came to break the even calm of the days. Very different was the life of to-day. The peace was spiritual purely, for the lively and varied round of daily life gave little time for repose and meditation, at least for Margaret. She had begun to give the children short but regular lessons in the morning, finding that the day was not only more profitable but pleasanter for them and for all, if it began with a little study. And the lessons were a delight to her. Remembering her struggles with Peggy,--dear Peggy,--it was a joy to teach these young creatures the beginnings of her beloved English history, and to see how they leaped at it, even as she herself had leaped so few years ago. They carried it about with them all day. Margaret never knew whom to expect to dinner in these days. Now a scowling potentate would stalk in with folded arms and announce that he was William the Conqueror, and demand the whereabouts of 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.