Hi! constable--' The children fled, and they think, and their father thinks, that they couldn't have done anything else.

Mother has her own opinion.
But father said they might keep the egg.
'The man certainly didn't know the egg was there when he brought the carpet,' said he, 'any more than your mother did, and we've as much right to it as he had.' So the egg was put on the mantelpiece, where it quite brightened up the dingy nursery.

The nursery was dingy, because it was a basement room, and its windows looked out on a stone area with a rockery made of clinkers facing the windows.

Nothing grew in the rockery except London pride and snails.
The room had been described in the house agent's list as a 'convenient breakfast-room in basement,' and in the daytime it was rather dark.

This did not matter so much in the evenings when the gas was alight, but then it was in the evening that the blackbeetles got so sociable, and used to come out of the low cupboards on each side of the fireplace where their homes were, and try to make friends with the children.