We waited up long for my father that night, mother and I. Bob had gone down to the village--to do some shopping, he said. But I could easily have told in what shop to find him--the one in which they don't, as a general rule, do up the goods with string and brown paper.
Then in the slow night, I with a book and she with her stocking, my mother and I sat and waited. It would have been nothing very unusual if father had not returned at all that night. He sometimes did this, when business kept him at East Dene or Thorsby. On such occasions his orders were that we should lock up at eleven and go quietly to bed. Mother mostly let the maid, Grace Rigley, go home to her father's house at the other end of the village. Indeed, we were always glad when she did, for it let us have the house to oursel
