Chapter 4

A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly
gave up the villa at Nice. Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having
seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little
tours--one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the
winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end of ten
days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back in
mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice "for ever," as they
said; but this didn't prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy May night,
into a second-class railway-carriage--you could never tell by which class
they would travel--where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful
collection of bundles and bags. The explanation of this manoeuvre was
that they had determined to spend the summer "in some bracing place"; but
in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment--a fourth floor in
a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the
portier was hateful--and passed the next four months in blank indigence.

The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and his
pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and Notre Dame, the Conciergerie and
all the museums, took a hundred remunerative rambles. They learned to
know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back another year for a
longer stay, the general character of which in Pemberton's memory to-day
mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first. He sees Morgan's
shabby knickerbockers--the everlasting pair that didn't match his blouse
and that as he grew longer could only grow faded. He remembers the
particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.

Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was
absolutely necessary--partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was as
indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher. "My dear fellow,
you _are_ coming to pieces," Pemberton would say to him in sceptical
remonstrance; to which the child would reply, looking at him serenely up
and down: "My dear fellow, so are you! I don't want to cast you in the
shade." Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this--the assertion so
closely represented the fact. If however the deficiencies of his own
wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn't like his little charge to
look too poor. Later he used to say "Well, if we're poor, why, after
all, shouldn't we look it?" and he consoled himself with thinking there
was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan's disrepair--it
differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and spoils his
things. He could trace perfectly the degrees by which, in proportion as
her little