“Rabbett,” says he to me once, when they was all going out—he was about nine years old then, or thereabout—“Rabbett, if you would like to see Rose before she goes, just stand in the passage, when I go into the drawing-room with her cloak and handkerchief. She has just sent me for them.” Now my young master loved his mother dearly, but he loved Rose even better; he was allers talking to me of her beauty. So says I, “I would like to see her.” And he runs up-stairs, quite pleased, and is down again in a minute. “I’ll leave the door open,” he says. And in he goes, with the cloak over his arm, and does leave it open, quite wide enough for me to see through. Miss Rose was standing by the fire, and beautiful she looked, in her grand evening dress, and so like what her mother had been that it gave me quite a start. There was a gentleman at her side, a-laughing and talking to her, and when Master Lionel goes in this party turns toward the door, to look at him, and I sees his face, and I gives a start again, for it were Captain Basil Roscoe. Now I knew sum’at of Captain Basil Roscoe, you see, and that’s what made me give a start. If ever there was a villain, and he to be called a gentleman, Captain Basil Roscoe were one. I knew things of him that he little guessed; we servants get to know many queer things. I felt, when I sees him, as if I saw a snake. “Here comes the wrap,” says Captain Basil, and he held out his hand, as if he meant to put it on for himself, but Miss Rose laughs and stops him. “No,” says she. “Lionel wouldn’t like that. Would you, Lionel? He always puts my cloak on for me.” The captain drew back a bit, and gave the boy a sharp glance, but Miss Rose did not see it, for she was bending down to have the cloak put over her white shoulders, and Master Lionel was a-folding it around her, as pleased as could be, laughing, too, boy-like, but, for all that, doing it as deft and graceful as if he’d been born to it. And then, when it was done, Miss Rose put her little hands on the shoulders of his jacket, and kissed him half-a-dozen times, so coaxing and merry and happy that I could not bear to think the time would ever come when life would look harder to her than it did just then—going out to a grand ball, in a pretty dress, and with her lover by her side. Unless it is true that the devil shrinks from and hates them as has no sins of their own, I should like to know why it was that Basil Roscoe were so ready in taking a dislike to a innocent-faced boy, as never harmed or differed with him; for nothing is more certain than that from the first he did take a dislike to Master Lionel. It struck me, once or twice, as he not only couldn’t bear the sight of him, but that, if he had had the chance, he would not have been sorry to do him a harm. His sneering manner showed it, and his ill-looking, handsome face showed it, apart from a hundred other bits of things. Master Lionel himself found it out soon enough.