the society were dancing in another room, and Mrs. Douglas took the opportunity of saying that she would come and sit quietly with her while the young people were amusing themselves.
So the next day she found it more expedient to declare that she was going to make the evening very amusing, and to arrange some charades.
"Come, Teviot, Ernest, all of you, you must each take a part."
"Who, I?" said Colonel Beaufort, looking at her with an air of astonishment from the very depths of his arm-chair, where he was sitting very contentedly by the side of Eliza. "My dear lady, you may just as well ask me to go and break stones for Teviot's new road; it would be quite as much in my line, and perhaps less trouble. I never shall forget what I went through last year at Kirwood Hall. I was asked there, and was foolishly good-natured enough to go. My mind misgave me the first evening that there was a screw loose,—that there was something sinister in the designs of the party. There were two or three abortive attempts at troublesome games, questions and answers, which entailed the bore of thinking; and forfeits which gave an infinity of trouble, as a penalty for having thought wrong. Well, I put down these atrocities by a contemptuous smile or two, but the next evening I was overborne in my turn; and I give you my honour, that I, who am by nature peaceable and inoffensive, and who had never done any harm to any human being in that house, was, during three hours, persecuted into being Lucius Junius Brutus, a village schoolmistress, the hind legs of a camelopard, and a wooden clock saying tick, tick, tick. The next morning I made an early transformation of myself into Colonel Beaufort in his travelling carriage; but I doubt whether my constitution has ever quite recovered the trial of Kirwood Hall. No, no charades, for the love of mercy."
