He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on "Tristram Shandy." "Tristram Shandy" was tight in the shelf—squeezed in between the "Phædo" and Hooker’s "Ecclesiastical Polity"—Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump. As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly’s room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew’s defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund’s truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done? "I hope he won’t hit his head when he wakes up," Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. "What a beautiful child he is!" and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid. Stronger and stronger grew the savour of sage and onions throughout the little house. It penetrated even to Mause in the garden, and she arose from her patch of sunshine and sniffed inquisitively. Mr. Wycherly grew stiff with kneeling, and rose to his feet. At the same moment Edmund rolled over and hit his leg against the edge of the sofa. It woke him, and the instant Edmund awoke he was wide awake. "Dearie, are you zere?" he demanded. He could see Mr. Wycherly’s legs, and no more, from where he was lying. In another minute he was sitting on Mr. Wycherly’s knee while that elderly scholar cudgelled his brains for some form of remonstrance which would bring home to this very youthful delinquent the impropriety of his conduct. "Dearie," Edmund exclaimed with disarming sweetness, "aren’t you glad I’m here wiv you?" Here he rubbed his soft face against Mr. Wycherly’s. "What a good smell! isn’t it? I’m so hungry: is there a bikkit about?" Mr. Wycherly steeled his heart: "You know, sonnie," he said very gravely, "that you ought not to be here at all; you ought to be with your dear aunt in church." Edmund looked at Mr. Wycherly in reproachful surprise. "In church?" he echoed, as though such a possibility had occurred to him for the first time that morning. "In church," Mr. Wycherly repeated. "Your dear aunt expected you to go there with her and with Montagu, and she was very sad that she had to go without you. It was not right of you to hide, sonnie. It was neither kind nor polite nor straightforward."