“Well, sir,” he answered, “I know it isn't right in my place to be talking, but there's Miss Rossano, sir--” I turned rather sharply round on him at the mention of that name, and Hinge, standing at attention, saluted. “No harm meant, sir,” he said, “and I 'ope, sir, there's no offence. But I took a letter from you to Miss Rossano, sir, last Wednesday week. It was the second time as I was in the house, sir, and when Miss Rossano came out to give me the answer, she saw as it was me, and she asks me in; and there was the count, sir, a-sitting in the parlor. And says Miss Rossano, 'Father,' she says, 'here's the faithful man,' she says, 'as treated you so kind when you was in prison along with them blooming Austrians,' she says; and the count he gets up in his grand way, and he shakes me by the hand, with his other hand on my shoulder. They'd have made me sit down between them, sir, if I'd a done it, and the count, sir, with his own hands, he powered me out a glass of sherry wine. It was the right sort, that was,” said Hinge, passing his hand across his lips with a gleam of remembrance, and instantly resuming his rigid attitude, as if he had suddenly found himself at fault, as, of course, in his own mind he did. “They was that kind between 'era and that nice way with it I didn't know whether I was a-standing on my head or my heels. And then the count he says something to Miss Rossano in his own lingo--language, I should ha' said, sir, begging your pardon--and Miss Rossano she answers him back again, and they get a-talking till there was tears in both their eyes, sir. And then Miss Rossano she fetches out her purse, sir, and she takes a ten-pound note, and here it is.” Hinge took it from his waistcoat pocket, and opened it out before me. “Of course, sir, I didn't want to take it, for whatever little bit I done I done it for my own amusement, as a man may say. I've had a-many larks in my time, but I never was paid for none of them like that--two pound a week pension for a lifetime and a easy job into the bargain. I didn't want to take this, sir,” Hinge continued, folding up the note and restoring it to his pocket; “but Miss Rossano she comes at me and shut it into my hand with both her own, whether I would or no, and all of a sudden, sir--” He stopped with a gulp, and swallowed laboriously twice or thrice. I was tickled, but I was touched at the same time, and touched pretty deeply; but I could not afford to show that to Hinge, and I dare say I looked pretty hard and stern at him. “What did she do?” I asked, rather gruffly. “She--she kissed my 'and, sir; that un.” He held out his right hand and looked at it as if it were, in some sort, a wonder. “I never seen anything done like it,” said Hinge. “And I was that took aback, and that delighted, and that flabbergastered!”