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?”

“Oh no, my dear, not prime,” said nurse.

“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.”

“No, you’d cry,” said Dick solemnly.

“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.’”

“Much he’d want it,” said Tom disdainfully.

But Susie stood declaiming on the sand-hill, inspired by her own eloquence, and gazed at with admiration by Amy for a courage she could not match.

“O Susie, how brave you are!” she said.  “They’d have to kill you to get at it; you couldn’t get at your heart till you were dead.  I don’t believe I could ever be as brave as that.  I know I should cry.”

“It’s called weep, my dear,” said nurse, “when it’s done by kings and queens.”

“Well, I should weep,” said Amy.  “And I make my wills quite differently to Susie.  I made a will this morning when it rained.  You know you said you were going to give me a paint-box on my birthday, nursie!  Well, if I live till my birthday, I’m going to leave it back to you in my will.”

“You needn’t trouble, Miss Amy,” said nurse, “because if you don’t live till your birthday I can keep it.”

“But that wouldn’t be my will,” said Amy, puzzled.

“But it would be your wish, my dear, which comes to the same thing.”

“Well, mine would be my will, but it wouldn’t be my wish,” said Susie.  “It would be history, and things in history are never so bad as things that happen to yourself.”

“But it would happen to yourself if it was your legs and arms you gave away,” said Amy.

“And I dare say it was just as bad to have your head cut off a hundred years ago as it would be to-day,” said nurse—­“I mean for the people themselves.”