I could lay down
my slate she had drawn off her gloves and had passed me. "No, don't stop
your lessons, I'll go myself," she said, and ran out.

A few minutes later the kitchen door opened softly, and my mother's
hand, appearing through the jar, beckoned to me mysteriously.

"Walk on your toes," whispered my mother, setting the example as she
led the way up the stairs; which after the manner of stairs showed their
disapproval of deception by creaking louder and more often than under
any other circumstances; and in this manner we reached my parents'
bedroom, where, in the old-fashioned wardrobe, relic of better days,
reposed my best suit of clothes, or, to be strictly grammatical, my
better.

Never before had I worn these on a week-day morning, but all
conversation not germane to the question of getting into them quickly
my mother swept aside; and when I was complete, down even to the new
shoes--Bluchers, we called them in those days--took me by the hand, and
together we crept down as we had crept up, silent, stealthy and alert.
My mother led me to the street door and opened it.

"Shan't I want my cap?" I whispered. But my mother only shook her
head and closed the door with a bang; and then the explanation of the
pantomime came to me, for with such "business"--comic, shall I call
it, or tragic?--I was becoming familiar; and, my mother's hand upon my
shoulder, we entered my father's office.

Whether from the fact that so often of an evening--our drawing-room
being reserved always as a show-room in case of chance visitors;
Cowper's poems, open face-downwards on the wobbly loo table; the
half-finished crochet work, suggestive of elegant leisure, thrown
carelessly over the arm of the smaller easy-chair--this office would
become our sitting-room, its books and papers, as things of no account,
being huddled out of sight; or whether from the readiness with which my
father would come out of it at all times to play at something else--at
cricket in the back garden on dry days or ninepins in the passage on
wet, charging back into it again whenever a knock sounded at the front
door, I cannot say. But I know that as a child it never occurred to
me to regard my father's profession as a serious affair. To me he was
merely playing there, surrounded by big books and bundles of documents,
labelled profusely but consisting only of blank papers; by japanned
tin boxes, lettered imposingly, but for the most part empty. "Sutton
Hampden,