"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?"
"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."
"_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.'"