My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage.  ’Now I have you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,’ he said.  I wished to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some other place.  He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth would do it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth in perfect trust.  We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey as of a day that had its charm.  Our pew among a fashionable congregation pleased him better.  The pew-opener curtseyed to none as she did to him.  For my part, I missed the monuments and the chants, and something besides that had gone—­I knew not what.  At the first indication of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy’s lodgings.  Then we read the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad.  An omission to perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning my lessons, he was the dread African magician to whom must be surrendered my acquisition of the ring and the musty old lamp.  We were quite in the habit of meeting fair Persians.  He would frequently ejaculate that he resembled the Three Calendars in more respects than one.  To divert me during my recovery from measles, he one day hired an actor in a theatre, and put a cloth round his neck, and seated him in a chair, rubbed his chin with soap, and played the part of the Barber over him, and I have never laughed so much in my life.  Poor Mrs. Waddy got her hands at her sides, and kept on gasping, ‘Oh, sir! oh!’ while the Barber hurried away from the half-shaved young man to consult his pretended astrolabe in the next room, where we heard him shouting the sun’s altitude, and consulting its willingness for the impatient young man to be further shaved; and back he came, seeming refreshed to have learnt the sun’s favourable opinion, and gabbling at an immense rate, full of barber’s business.  The servants were allowed to be spectators; but as soon as the young man was shaved, my father dismissed them with the tone of a master.  No wonder they loved him.  Mrs. Waddy asked who could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration of him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world.  To have his hand in mine was my delight.  Then it was that I could think earnestly of Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I would not have minded his marrying.  My favourite dream was to see him shooting an arrow in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because of not finding his arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to, and wandering after it till he passed out of green fields to grassy rocks, and to a stony desert, where at last he found his arrow at an enormous distance from the shooting line, and there was the desert all about him, and the sweetest fairy ever imagined going to show herself to him in the ground under his feet.  In his absence I really hungered for him, and was jealous.