Mr.Goodworth poured himself out a glass of sherry, made a remark on the weather, and soon resumed his cheerful, everyday manner.

But he did not forget the pledge that he had given to Mr.Thorpe.From that time forth, he never by word or deed interfered again in his grandson's education.
***** While the theory of Mr.Thorpe's system of juvenile instruction was being discussed in the free air of the parlor, the practical working of that theory, so far as regarded the case of Master Zack, was being exemplified in anything but a satisfactory manner, in the prison-region of the dressing-room.
While she ascended the first flight of stairs, Mrs.Thorpe's ears informed her that her son was firing off one uninterrupted volley of kicks against the door of his place of confinement.

As this was by no means an unusual circumstance, whenever the boy happened to be locked up for bad behavior, she felt distressed, but not at all surprised at what she heard; and went into the drawing-room, on her way up stairs, to deposit her Bible and Prayerbook (kept in a morocco case, with gold clasps) on the little side-table, upon which they were always placed during week-days.

Possibly, she was so much agitated that her hand trembled; possibly, she was in too great a hurry; possibly, the household imp who rules the brittle destinies of domestic glass and china, had marked her out as his destroying angel for that day; but however it was, in placing the morocco case on the table, she knocked down and broke an ornament standing near it--a little ivory model of a church steeple in the florid style, enshrined in a glass case.

Picking up the fragments, and mourning over the catastrophe, occupied some little time, more than she was aware of, before she at last left the drawing-room, to proceed on her way to the upper regions.
As she laid her hand on the banisters, it struck her suddenly and significantly, that the noises in the dressing-room above had entirely ceased.
The instant she satisfied herself of this, her maternal imagination, uninfluenced by what Mr.Thorpe had said below stairs, conjured up an appalling vision of Zack before his father's looking-glass, with his chin well lathered, and a bare razor at his naked throat.