Adam answered for the children. "They don't go anywhere, sir. They get schooling enough on week days, when they must go. I'm glad for them to learn, but they want their little heads to rest one day in the seven."
It was a good thing that baby became obstreperous, and insisted on joining her elders on the ground. So they formed themselves into a bodyguard for the youngest darling, and led her to the soft grass on the other side of the walk, where they enticed her to join in gambols contrived for her special benefit.
"We fathers like to look on such pictures," said Mr. Drummond, still lingering by Adam's side, and pointing to the children.
"We do, sir."
Mr. Drummond, by coupling his own interests with those of Adam, had forged another connecting link between them.
"By the way, Livesey, where do you and your family go on Sundays?"
The man's first inclination was purposely to misunderstand the question and say, "Sometimes to this place, but mostly we stop about home." But the striker's nature was a true one, and he hated himself for thinking of such a paltry subterfuge. So he replied,—
"To say the truth, sir, we don't go to church or chapel any more than the children go to school. I never was in a religious way myself, and Maggie, though she had been used to go to a place of worship when she was in service, never had much heart for it. She liked better to take a walk with me, and show her pretty face beside my ugly one. She wore pretty bonnets too, in those days. If we did not trouble about church before, we weren't likely to put ourselves out when there was a baby to mind. So we keep to a church with a chimney, though by that we don't mean what your public-house men do. It's just our own little place you would find us in, mostly."
"I wish you would go for a time or two to hear a gentleman I know something about," said the manager.
"I don't know why you should trouble about where we go, sir," said Adam, with the least pleasant manner Mr. Drummond had noticed. "What matter does it make whether a poor chap like me spends his Sunday at home or in the streets, so long as he isn't doing any harm, or drinking himself into a—"