again for months, and for years never until he had ascertained that
his father was out. "It was a mistake," he told me once, apropos of
it. "If he had said that it disturbed him, but that I might do it
later, I should have been delighted to stop. I always liked feeling
that I was obliging people."

He disliked his father, and feared him. The tall, handsome gentleman,
accustomed to be obeyed, in reality passionately fond of his
children, dismayed him. He once wrote on a piece of paper the words,
"I hate papa," and buried it in the garden.

For the rest, he was an ordinary, rather clever, secretive child,
speaking very little of his feelings, and caring, as he has told me
since, very little for anybody except his nurse. "I cared about her
in a curious way. I enjoyed the sensation of crying over imaginary
evils; and I should not like to say how often in bed at night I used
to act over in my mind an imaginary death-bed scene of my nurse, and
the pathetic remarks she was to make about Master Arthur, and the
edifying bearing I was to show. This was calculated within a given
time to produce tears, and then I was content."

He went to a private school, which he hated, and then to Winchester,
which he grew to love. The interesting earnest little boy merged into
the clumsy loose-jointed schoolboy, silent and languid. There are
hardly any records of this time.

"My younger sister died," he told me, "when I was at school. I
experienced about ten minutes of grief; my parents were overwhelmed
with anguish, and I can remember that, like a quick, rather clever
child, I soon came to comprehend the sort of remark that cheered