In the case of the Brown family, Mr. Brown usually went off to his office soon after breakfast, leaving Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Bird to go about their daily tasks. Most days, apart from the times when Jonathan and Judy were home for the school holidays, Paddington spent the morning visiting his friend Mr. Gruber for cocoa and buns. There were occasional upsets, of course, but on the whole the household was like an ocean liner. It steamed happily on its way, no matter what the weather. So when Mrs. Bird returned home one day to what she fully expected to be an empty house and saw a strange face peering at her through the landing window, it took a moment or two to recover from the shock, and by then whoever it was had gone. What made it far worse was the fact that she was halfway up the stairs to her bedroom at the time, which meant the face belonged to someone outside the house. She hadn’t seen any sign of a ladder on her way in; but all the same she rushed back downstairs again, grabbed the first weapon she could lay her hands on, and dashed out into the garden.
