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