Nurse deftly slipped a little shirt over his head and a flannel nightgown over that, and behold! he sat clothed and joyous on her knee before Edmund had finished his second acrobatic feat.
Edmund walked on his hands. He did handsprings. He turned somersaults, and finally played leap-frog with Montagu, but whatever he did that insatiable baby shouted, "Adain," bouncing up and down on his nurse's knee in enthusiastic appreciation of the entertainment.
Meanwhile Mrs. Methuen had found and packed up two pairs of thick cream-coloured casement curtains. She ran tapes in them ready to put up, for she was convinced there would be no rods; she also packed a hammer and nails, but she never knew what it was caused her to slip her travelling flask of brandy into the pocket of her coat.
She fetched the boys, and her small son roared in indignation at their departure, which upset her extremely.
However, it was getting late and the windows in Holywell were bare.
Meanwhile Mr. Wycherly had been working very hard: stooping and lifting, carrying and stretching, to arrange the Earlier Latin Authors in the top shelf of an empty bookcase. Some of the authors were heavy and calf-bound and Mr. Wycherly, who had eaten hardly anything at all that day, began to feel very tired. He was quite unused to violent exercise of any kind, and presently he became conscious of a most unpleasant pain in his left side. "A stitch, I suppose," he said to himself and went on stooping and lifting, for he had come to the last layer of books and wanted to feel that one case at any rate was unpacked.
The boys and Mrs. Methuen returned, but he didn't hear them.
"I'll go upstairs and begin at once," said Mrs. Methuen, "and you needn't tell Mr. Wycherly anything about it till I've gone."
She and Edmund went up into Mr. Wycherly's bedroom while Montagu tried to find his guardian. He was not in either of the sitting-rooms. That they had seen from the windows before they came in. Nor was he in the kitchen or the garden. At last Montagu bethought him of the hitherto unused study, climbed the steep, crooked staircase, and went down the sloping passage to look.
Mrs. Methuen was standing on a chair at one side of the window fastening the tape of a curtain round a nail she had just knocked in, while Edmund stood on another chair at the other side, holding the rest of the curtain that its fairness might not be sullied by contact with the extremely dusty floor, when Montagu burst into the room looking very frightened.