"Couldn't keep it up," suggested Sir Toady Lion; "books can't all be caves, you know."
"Well, anyhow, I'm not going to play any more heroes," said Hugh John, emphatically. "I bags Hatteraick—when we get out to the Den!"
The young man intimated by these cabalistic words that the part of Hatteraick was to be his in any future play-acting.
"Which being interpreted," said Sweetheart, with spirit, "means that I am to be Gilbert Faa the gipsy, and Glossin, and all these nasty sort of people. Now I don't mind Meg Merrilies a bit. And being shot like that—that's always something. But I warn you, Hugh John, that if you were Hatteraick ten times over, you couldn't get me down over that iron bar!"
"No, that you couldn't," said Sir Toady Lion, seeing a far-off chance for himself; "why, Sweetheart could just batter your head against the wall! And then when Mac-Guffog came in the morning with his lantern, he'd find that old Hatteraick hadn't any need to go and hang himself! But don't you two squabble over it; I will do Hatteraick myself!"
"A very likely thing!" sneered Hugh John. "You heard me say 'Bags Hatteraick,' Toady Lion! Every one heard me—you can't go back on that. You know you can't!"
This was unanswerable. It was felt that to palter with such sacred formulas would be to renounce the most sacred obligations and to unsettle the very foundations of society.
Whereupon I hastened to keep his Majesty's peace by proposing a compromise.
"The girls surely don't want to play the villains' parts," I began.
"Oh, but just don't they!" ejaculated Maid Margaret, with the eyes of a child-saint momentarily disappointed of Paradise. "Why does a cat not eat butter for breakfast every morning? Because it jolly well can't get it."