a blue silk dress and
turquoises. So the children were left to themselves.

You know the empty hush which settles down on a house when the grown-ups
have gone out to dinner and you have the whole evening to do what you
like in. The children stood in the hall a moment after the carriage
wheels had died away with the scrunching swish that the carriage wheels
always made as they turned the corner by the lodge, where the gravel was
extra thick and soft owing to the droppings from the trees. From the
kitchen came the voices of the servants, laughing and talking.

'It's two hours at least to bedtime,' said Alison. 'What shall we do?'
Alison always began by saying 'What shall we do?' and always ended by
deciding what should be done. 'You all say what you think,' she went
on, 'and then we'll vote about it. You first, Ken, because you're the
visitor.'

'Fishing,' said Kenneth, because it was the only thing he could think
of.

'Make toffee,' said Conrad.

'Build a great big house with all the bricks,' said George.

'We can't make toffee,' Alison explained gently but firmly, 'because you
know what the pan was like last time, and cook said, "never again, not
much." And it's no good building houses, Georgie, when you could be out
of doors. And fishing's simply rotten when we've been at it all day.
I've thought of something.'

So of course all the others said, 'What?'

'We'll have a pageant, a river pageant, on the moat. We'll all dress up
and hang Chinese lanterns in the trees. I'll be the Sunflower lady that
the Troubadour came all across the sea, because he loved her so, for,
and one of you can be the Troubadour, and the others can be sailors or
anything you like.'

'I shall be the Troubadour,' said Conrad with decision.

'I think you ought to let Kenneth because he's the visitor,' said
George, who would have liked to be it immensely himself, or anyhow did
not see why Conrad should be a troubadour if _he_ couldn't.

Conrad said what manners required, which was:

'Oh! all right, I don't care about being the beastly Troubadour.'

'You might be the Princess's brother,' Alison suggested.

'Not me,' said Conrad scornfully, 'I'll be the captain of the ship.'

'In a turban the brother would be, with the Benares cloak, and the
Persian dagger out of the cabinet in the drawing-room,' Alison went on
unmoved.

'I'll be that,' said George.

'No, you won't, I shall, so there,' said Conrad. 'You can be the captain
of the sh