"But I thought time didn't move—I thought. . . ."
"It was the money upset everything," she said; "it always does upset everything. I ought to have known. Now attend carefully. No one knows you have been away. You've seemed to be here, learning and playing and doing everything like you used. And you're on a visit now to your cousins at your uncle's town house. And you all have lessons together—thy tutor gives them. And thy cousins love him no better than thou dost. All thou hast to do is to forget thy dream, and take up thy life here—and be slow to speak, for a day or two, till thou hast grown used to thine own place. Thou'lt have lessons alone to-day. One of the cousins goes with his mother to be her page and bear her train at the King's revels at Whitehall, and the other must sit and sew her sampler. Her mother says she hath run wild too long."
So Dickie had lessons alone with his detested tutor, and his relief from the panic fear of the morning raised his spirits to a degree that unfortunately found vent in what was, for him, extreme naughtiness. He drew a comic picture of his tutor—it really was rather like—with a scroll coming out of his mouth, and on the scroll the words, "Because I am ugly I need not be hateful!" His tutor, who had a nasty way of creeping up behind people, came up behind him at the wrong moment. Dickie was caned on both hands and kept in. Also his dinner was of bread and water, and he had to write out two hundred times, "I am a bad boy, and I ask the pardon of my good tutor. The fifth day of November, 1608." So he did not see his aunt and cousin in their Whitehall finery—and it was quite late in the afternoon before he even saw his other cousin, who had been sampler-sewing. He would not have written out the lines, he felt sure he would not, only he thought of his cousin and wanted to see her again. For she was the only little girl friend he had.
When the last was done he rushed into the room where she was—he was astonished to find that he knew his way about the house quite well, though he could not remember ever having been there before—and cried out—
"Thy task done? Mine is, too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I thought of thee, and for this once I did all his biddings. So now we are free. Come play ball in the garden!"
His cousin looked up from her sampler, set the frame down and jumped up.
"I am so glad," she said. "I do hate this horrid sampler!"
And as she said it Dickie had a most odd feeling, rather as if a clock had struck, or had stopped striking—a feeling of sudden change. But he could not wait to wonder about it or to question what it was that he really felt. His cousin was waiting.
"Come, Elfrida," he said, and held out his hand. They went together into the garden.
Now if you have read a book called "The House of Arden" you will already know that Dickie's cousins were called Edred and Elfrida, and that their father, Lord Arden, had a beautiful castle by the sea, as well as a house in London, and that he and his wife were great favorites at the Court of King James the First. If you have not read that book, and didn't already know these things—well, you know them now. And Arden was Dickie's own name too, in this old life, and his father was Sir Richard Arden, of Deptford and Aylesbury. And his tutor was Mr. Parados, called Parrot-nose "for short" by his disrespectful pupils.