Adam half wished that he had responded more pleasantly to Mr. Drummond's advances; for what was it to him how a poor labouring chap spent his Sundays unless he thought there might be a change for the better? He felt just a little glad that these services in Aqueduct Street were not drawing to a close. There were eight days before him yet. Maybe—
"Adam, just carry baby up to bed, will you, whilst I wash Jack?" cried Maggie, interrupting Adam's meditations.
Baby's bath was over, and it was the usual thing for Adam to convoy the little ones to their beds.
The youngest three, being half the sum total of his olive branches, were thus seen to. The elders scrambled off by themselves. Adam rose at once to perform this duty, and thus his cogitations were brought to an end for the time.
It seemed that there was a conspiracy to upset the habits of the Liveseys, for little Maggie revealed to her mother that two of her schoolfellows had been asking her if she would go with them to Sunday school.
The child would not have ventured to say anything but for the fact that these children were always cited by Mrs. Livesey as examples of neatness and "pretty behaviour." Compelled to send her three eldest to a day school, though she parted with Maggie very unwillingly, the mother was very particular in her instructions as to the company they were to keep.
"Mind you don't go with any of 'em that are rude and say bad words. And keep away from such as are dirty. You never know what you may get. I want you to have clean ways, and to behave so as, if your grandmother ever does see you, she may know that I've done my best."
The mention of her mother always caused a double feeling in poor Mrs. Livesey's mind—resentment that she had been so left to herself, and pain that Mrs. Allison could do it. She had not visited Millborough since she left it six years before, and her daughter could not go to her. Two or three letters a year, and as many parcels of partially-worn clothing from the well-to-do sister, near whom she had taken up her abode, were all that told Mrs. Livesey that she was not quite forgotten by her mother.
Still she thought, "Surely she will want to see me some day, and I should like to show her the children."
Every mother longs to exhibit her children to their grandparents, and somehow the thought of what grandmother would think of them when they did meet, was often in Mrs. Livesey's mind.