"These very respectable old ladies now looked anything but neat! Their curls were flying in all directions, and they were screaming with laughter, pinching each other, and making all sorts of silly jokes over a furious game of 'hunt the slipper.' For you see they had gone back to what they used to like when they were children.
"Queen May looked at them gravely.
"'Dear friends,' she said, 'at your age, is this decorous? Is it proper? Is it even ladylike?'
"'There it is! Catch it! Catch it!' cried one of the old ladies.
"'Come and play with us!' cried another.
"None of the rest paid any attention to the serious looks of the grown-up children who went sadly on toward the fort, hoping to find some one more reasonable.
"The next person they saw was the lord chancellor, a bald, stout old gentleman, who was sitting on the woolsack, which, you remember, he had carried away on his back. He was very busy with a pipe, and the children thought he was smoking, and grew more hopeful. He might have some trace of good sense left, they thought, if he could care for such a grown-up pursuit."
Here Uncle Jack offered his cigar to Bryda politely; but she made a face and turned her head away.
"I don't want to be so grown-up as that," she said.
"Oh!" said Uncle Jack, with his funny face, that he always put on to tease Bryda. "Oh, I thought you wanted to grow up all of a sudden."