Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively.
Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the same moment Edmund rolled over and hit his leg against the edge of the sofa. It woke him, and the instant Edmund awoke he was wide awake. "Dearie, are you zere?" he demanded. He could see Mr. Wycherly's legs, and no more, from where he was lying. In another minute he was sitting on Mr. Wycherly's knee while that elderly scholar cudgelled his brains for some form of remonstrance which would bring home to this very youthful delinquent the impropriety of his conduct.
"Dearie," Edmund exclaimed with disarming sweetness, "aren't you glad I'm here wiv you?" Here he rubbed his soft face against Mr. Wycherly's. "What a good smell! isn't it? I'm so hungry: is there a bikkit about?"
Mr. Wycherly steeled his heart: "You know, sonnie," he said very gravely, "that you ought not to be here at all; you ought to be with your dear aunt in church."
Edmund looked at Mr. Wycherly in reproachful surprise. "In church?" he echoed, as though such a possibility had occurred to him for the first time that morning.
"In church," Mr. Wycherly repeated. "Your dear aunt expected you to go there with her and with Montagu, and she was very sad that she had to go without you. It was not right of you to hide, sonnie. It was neither kind nor polite nor straightforward."
"You doesn't go," Edmund argued, staring gloomily at Mr. Wycherly. "Why mus' I?"
"You must go because your dear aunt wishes it," Mr. Wycherly replied, ignoring the first part of Edmund's remark.
"Would you go if see wissed it?"
"I would. But you see, for me it is different. I was brought up in a different kind of church, and I am no longer a little boy. Miss Esperance has never asked me to go to church with her."