This suggestion was adopted, and the new game kept them occupied for quite ten minutes. After that Pipette surrendered unconditionally. To hold your tongue is bad enough, but to hold your breath as well, in competition with a small, silent boy with a solemn face, serious eyes, and lungs apparently of gutta-percha, who seems to suffer no inconvenience from feats of endurance that would exhaust a Red Indian, is more than a mere daughter of Eve can compass. They were in the Consulting Room at the time, Father having gone out, as he always did between eleven and one; and the various unexplained mysteries of that delightful apartment, which were becoming a serious strain upon Pipette's feminine curiosity, once more lay before them. For the hundredth time they made the tour of the room, gazing, fingering, and wondering. They merely sighed as they passed the Oven Door. That mysterious portal was past all comprehension. They had made one last effort to obtain first-hand information on the subject only last night, with highly unsatisfactory results. They were always taken to the dining-room at half-past seven to say good-night to Father, who to his numerous other eccentricities added that of eating his dinner at an hour when properly constituted people were going to bed. (Pip's rather hazy scheme of theology, imbibed in scraps from Cook and others, included a private heaven of his own construction, in which at bedtime little boys, instead of being hustled upstairs by an under-housemaid, sat down to a heavy dinner of several courses.) On this occasion the pair had entered the dining-room bound by the most deadly oaths known to childhood to break down their shyness, and ask once and for all what lay behind the Oven Door. But alas! desire outran performance, and both--all three, in fact--made a sorry mess of things. The big man, almost as shy of them as they were of him, asked Pip, heavily but kindly, how he had spent the afternoon; not because he wished to know, but because the question afforded a conversational opening. Pip replied politely that he had been down the street posting a letter with "one of the girls." He used the expression in all good faith: his firm friend the milkman cried it down the area every afternoon in some such form as, "Anything fresh to-day, girls?" or, "Well, girls, what news?" The big man, however, frowned, and said, "Come, come, sir, no kitchen manners here, if you please," and turned to Pipette, who, with a boldness surprising to herself, was endeavouring to climb on to his knee. Having reached that eminence, Pipette, assuming a certain coaxing expression which she had found absolutely infallible with Cook, and not without a certain effect on Mr. Evans himself, said rather tremulously-- "Please, Father, is that oven door in the Kersultin' Room _reelly_ a oven, or is it just--just to put bad little boys and girls in, like what Mr. Evans says?"