smell of tobacco smoke and leather bindings was grateful to the senses.
The room smelt even more strongly than usual of tobacco smoke this
afternoon, and Mark inhaled the air with relish while he debated which
of the many volumes he should pore over. There was a large Bible with
pictures of palm-trees and camels and long-bearded patriarchs surrounded
by flocks of sheep, pictures of women with handkerchiefs over their
mouths drawing water from wells, of Daniel in the den of lions and of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The frontispiece
was a coloured picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded
by amiable lions, benevolent tigers, ingratiating bears and leopards and
wolves. But more interesting than the pictures were some pages at the
beginning on which, in oval spaces framed in leaves and flowers, were
written the names of his grandfather and grandmother, of his father and
of his father's brother and sister, with the dates on which they were
born and baptized and confirmed. What a long time ago his father was
born! 1840. He asked his mother once about this Uncle Henry and Aunt
Helen; but she told him they had quarrelled with his father, and she had
said nothing more about them. Mark had been struck by the notion that
grown-up people could quarrel: he had supposed quarrelling to be
peculiar to childhood. Further, he noticed that Henry Lidderdale had
married somebody called Ada Prewbody who had died the same year; but
nothing was said in the oval that enshrined his father about his having
married anyone. He asked his mother the reason of this, and she
explained to him that the Bible had belonged to his grandfather who had
kept the entries up to date until he died, when the Bible came to his
eldest son who was Mark's father.

"Does it worry you, darling, that I'm not entered?" his mother had asked
with a smile.