for Mr Pontifex had given ten shillings for the frame. The paper on the
walls was unchanged; the roses were still waiting for the bees; and the
whole family still prayed night and morning to be made "truly honest and
conscientious."

One picture only was removed--a photograph of himself which had hung
under one of his father and between those of his brother and sister.
Ernest noticed this at prayer time, while his father was reading about
Noah's ark and how they daubed it with slime, which, as it happened, had
been Ernest's favourite text when he was a boy. Next morning, however,
the photograph had found its way back again, a little dusty and with a
bit of the gilding chipped off from one corner of the frame, but there
sure enough it was. I suppose they put it back when they found how rich
he had become.

In the dining-room the ravens were still trying to feed Elijah over the
fireplace; what a crowd of reminiscences did not this picture bring back!
Looking out of the window, there were the flower beds in the front garden
exactly as they had been, and Ernest found himself looking hard against
the blue door at the bottom of the garden to see if there was rain
falling, as he had been used to look when he was a child doing lessons
with his father.

After their early dinner, when Joey and Ernest and their father were left
alone, Theobald rose and stood in the middle of the hearthrug under the
Elijah picture, and began to whistle in his old absent way. He had two
tunes only, one was "In my Cottage near a Wood," and the other was the
Easter Hymn; he had been trying to whistle them all his life, but had
never succeeded; he whistled them as a clever bullfinch might whistle
them--he had got them, but he had not got them right; he would be a
semitone out in every third note as though reverting to some remote
musical progenitor, who had known none but the Lydian or the Phrygian
mode, or whatever would enable him to go most wrong while still keeping
the tune near enough to be recognised. Theobald stood before the middle
of the fire and whistled his two tunes softly in his own old way till
Ernest left the room; the unchangedness of the external and changedness
of the internal he felt were likely to throw him completely off his
balance.

He strolled out of doors into the sodden spinney behind the house, and
solaced himself with a pipe. Ere long he found himself at the door of
the cottage of his father's coachman, who had ma