“Yes, indeed, and a very sweet one,” said papa. “I’m afraid, perhaps, she spoilt me a very little. When I was a child the rules for small people were much stricter than they are now. But I was never at all afraid of my mother.”
“Were you afraid of your father?” asked Leigh with great interest.
“Well, just a little perhaps. I had to be a very obedient boy, I can tell you. That reminds me of a story—”
“Oh, papa, do tell it us!” said all three at once, while Mary, who was holding his hand, began giving little jumps up and down in her eagerness.
“It was ever so long ago, almost thirty years! I was only six at the time. My father had to go up to London for a few days, and as my mother was away from home—nursing her mother who was ill—”
“What was she to us?” interrupted Leigh, who liked to get things straight in his head.
“Great-grandmother,” answered his father; “one of your great-grandmothers, not the one that we have a picture of, though.”
“I thought we had pictures of all our grand—I don’t know what you call them—for hundreds of years,” said Leigh.
“Ancestors, you mean,” said his father, “but mostly the Bertram ones of course. But if I begin explaining about that now, we’ll never get on with my story. Where was I? Oh, yes! I was telling you that my father took me up to London with him, rather than leave me alone at home. I was very pleased to go, for I’d never been in a town before, and I thought myself quite a great man, going off travelling alone with my father. We stayed at an hotel—I’m not sure where it was, but that doesn’t matter; I only know it was in a quiet street running out of another large wide street, where there were lots of shops of all kinds, and carriages and omnibuses and carts always passing by. My father took me out with him as much as he could; sometimes he would leave me waiting for him in a cab at the door of the houses where he had to see people on business, and once or twice he found me fast asleep when he came out. He didn’t think that good for me; so after that, he sometimes left me in the hotel in the care of the landlady who had a nice little girl just about my age, with whom I used to play very happily.
“One day—the day before we were to leave—my father took me out shopping with him. He had to buy some presents, for it was near Christmas-time, to take home for the little cousins who were coming to stay with us. We went off to a large toy-shop in the big street I told you of. It was a very large shop, with a door at each end—one out of the big street, and the other opening on to a smaller back street nearer our hotel. And besides the toy-shop there was another part where they sold dressing-cases and travelling-bags and things of that kind.