"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, and proclaiming herself aloud to be the highly theatrical personage described above, she would have opened her eyes in gentle and rather scornful amazement. But Margaret was learning many things in these days, and among them the art of being a child. Her life had been mostly spent with older people; she had never known till now the rapture of being a little girl, a little boy. Now, seeing it in these bright faces, that never failed to grow brighter at sight of her, she felt the joy reflected in her own face, in her own heart; and it was good to let all the quiet, contained maiden ways go, once in a while, and just be a child with the children, or a Flail of the Desert, as in the present instance. John Montfort, leaning on the gate, watched the pretty play, well pleased. "They have done her all the good in the world," he said to himself. "It isn't only what she has done for them, bless her, but for her, too, it has been a great thing. I was selfish and stupid to think that a young creature could go on growing to fulness, without other young creatures about it. How will she feel, I wonder, about their going? How would she like--" [Illustration: "THE 'FLAIL OF THE DESERT.'"]