* * * * *

“I can’t think how all this sand has got into your stockings,” said nurse.  “I should hope you didn’t paddle after I left you, against my orders!”

There was silence, and in another moment Susie would have told the truth, but before the words came faltering out nurse spoke again.

“But there!  I can trust you, with all your troublesome ways,” she said.

And this time Susie could not speak.

CHAPTER VII.

As time went on it grew so perilously easy to be deceitful!  No one thought of doubting them—­no one thought of asking what they did when they were left alone.

Day after day, as nurse’s toiling figure disappeared up the wooden steps on to the cliff, Dash and Dot burst round the corner of the rocks, and almost without a word spoken, Susie’s shoes and stockings were flung to the winds, and she was scampering at headlong speed from pool to pool, with Tom at her heels—­like a wild creature, and in a condition that would have fairly horrified poor nurse, who held that all well-conducted young ladies, like the Queen of Spain, should have no visible legs!

Really, in her heart, Susie did not like the twins so very much.  They were wild and unkempt, and very boisterous; their twinkling black eyes radiated mischief, but it was the sort of mischief that bewildered Susie and rather frightened her.  Nurse puzzled over her mangled stockings and the hideous rents in her skirts, and Mrs. Beauchamp’s patient fingers grew stiff with darning; but whilst Susie flew about the rocks, careless and dishevelled, she always forgot how sorry she was going to be afterwards, and how uncomfortable her conscience was at night.

“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.