And then it were—just at that instant—as his sharp young eyes spied something out ahead of us, for he drew his hand away, and started running, just throwing back a word or so to me. “There’s a carriage before the door,” he said, “and they are getting into it.” He were up that street like a deer, and in half a minute I were with him; but when I comes up, all out of breath, he were on the carriage-step, holding the door open; and, what’s more, holding at bay the black rascal who stood near, sneering and raging at him by turns. “Rabbett,” he cries out, “help me to hold the door open. No—go to the horses’ heads. Now, Rose, get out.” I went to the horses’ heads, as I would have done if the captain himself had give the order, instead of “The Captain’s Youngest.” It made my heart ache, too, to hear the ring in the little chap’s voice, so like his father’s, and then to remember what the captain might have been—and what he were. Even the driver were struck all of a heap by the youngster’s pluck, and were so busy looking at him that he let me take my stand, without a word against it. “Look here, mate,” he says to me, “here’s a rum go!” “It’s bad enough,” says I. “Perhaps you’ll oblige me with them reins?” “If you don’t come down from that step,” says Roscoe, saying every word slow, as if he was trying to hold himself back from striking the boy a blow as would kill him, “you impudent young devil, I will take the whip from the box there and cut you to pieces!” Then Miss Rose bends forward. It is my impression as the cruel, murderous sound in the fellow’s voice was something she had never heard before, and it frightened her. “Don’t speak to him in that way, Basil,” she says. “Oh, Lionel, dear, you shouldn’t have come. You must go back. You must, indeed. I shall never come home again, Lionel.” And she burst out crying. “I shall go back, Rose,” says the boy, “but you must come with me. Rabbett and I came to fetch you, and we shall not leave you.” And then he looks at Roscoe square. “I am not afraid of your cutting me to pieces with your whip, sir,” he says. “Rabbett will see to that. But,” and the fire blazed up in his voice and his face and his eyes, as grand as if he had been the captain himself, “if I had come alone I would not have left this carriage door unless Rose had come with me. You might have used your whip, but you couldn’t have made me do that.” “Am I,” says Roscoe, panting with the passion he dare not let out, “am I to throw you into the street under the horses’ hoofs, you impudent young devil?” But Master Lionel’s back was turned to him. He was pleading with his sister. “Rose, dear,” he says, “come home with me. You will come home with me, I know.” And he caught hold of her hand.