While Mr. Lowther went to eat his dinner with the hospitable magistrate, Francis Tredethlyn did his work briskly; folding his master’s coats and waistcoats, brushing boots, clearing away little heaps of cigar-ash, and picking up torn scraps of paper and open books cast recklessly upon the floor by a reader who was too badly disposed towards a world that had ill-treated him to find the opinions of any author entirely to his taste. The soldier whistled that lively melody in praise of Erin’s daughters all the time, and achieved his task with the rapid neatness of a male Cinderella specially endowed by some fairy godmother; and when Mr. Lowther’s humble sitting-room and bed-room were restored to perfect order, his valet retired to his own little apartment, which was a shed-like chamber at the back of the cottage, and a kind of compromise between a dressing-room and a wash-house. Here Mr. Tredethlyn made his toilet, which consisted of a rapid plunge of his head and throat into a tub of cold water, some brisk operations with a cake of yellow soap, accompanied by sputtering and whizzing noises of an alarming character, a little fierce rubbing down with a coarse towel, and the smart application of a stiff and implacable-looking hair-brush. When this was done, Francis Tredethlyn put on his jacket, and went out into the garden to smoke his pipe and converse with the convicts. Now that the gifts of nature had been enhanced by the adornments of art, the ensign’s valet was by no means a bad-looking fellow. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular in build as a modern Hercules. His closely cut black hair revealed the outline of a well-shaped head well placed upon his shoulders. Under his dark, almost gipsy-brown, skin was a rich crimson glow, which deepened or faded under the influence of any powerful emotion. His nose was straight, but rather short, and of no particular type; but a sculptor would have told you there was a special beauty about the curve of his full open nostrils, and Honoré de Balzac would have informed you that a man with that kind of nostril is generally good for something in this world. His forehead was low, stronger in the perceptive than in the reflective organs; his eyes were of a clear grey, darkened by the shadow of thick black lashes. He was a handsome soldier; he would have made a handsome gladiator in the old Roman days; a noble-looking brigand, in the days when brigands were chivalrous; a dashing highwayman, in the age when Claude Duval rode gaily to his death on Tyburn tree; a glorious sporting farmer down in Leicestershire to-day; but no power upon this earth could have transformed him into an elegant West-end lounger, an accomplished dawdler in fashionable drawing-rooms, or a “gentleman” in the modern acceptation of the word.