He were hurt and bruised and broken that bad—poor little fellow!—that when the doctor came, and were beginning to go to work on him he looks up at me with his bright, troubled eye, and says to me: “Rabbett, please take hold of my hand.” I were that near breaking down and sobbing out loud that I were ashamed of myself. It were a comfort to me, in many a day after, to think I had took hold of his hand, and that he had asked me to do it. And when the hard job was over, the doctor put his hands into his coat pockets, and stands looking at him for a minute or so, and then he turns to me and beckons me out of the room. “Sir,” I ventured to say, “Master Lionel—will he——” But I could not finish, somehow. I meant to say, “Will he get over it?” “No,” says he. “I am very sorry to say it; but he will not.” Will you believe me as the words struck me like a slung-shot. Not having no family of my own, and never having clung to nothing on earth as I had clung to that there generous, neglected little fellow, just at that minute I felt as if I’d got a blow as was too hard to stand up against. I couldn’t face it straight. When I had been lonely in my way, he had been lonely in his, and we had been a help and a comfort to each other in ways as outsiders never understood. “Sir,” I puts it to him, quite hoarse when I gets my voice back, “when——” And I couldn’t finish that question neither. “Well,” he answers me back, “I am afraid before morning.” I went back to the room and stayed there all night. It seemed a strange sort of thing that at the very last him and me was together alone, as we always had seemed to be. He had coaxed Miss Rose to go to bed; he would not rest until she went; and when she bent down to kiss him, he says to her, in a whisper, quite bright and cheerful: “Don’t cry, Rose. It’s all right.” And then the captain gets tired, and begins to doze, and Mrs. Dalgetty falls asleep on the sofa; and so Master Lionel and me was left together; me watching him, and listening to the clock ticking; him lying quiet, with his eyes shut. But toward daybreak he gets a bit restless, and stirs, and the next thing I sees him looking at me, quite wide awake. “Rabbett,” says he, in a bit of a hurry, “open the window.” And when I goes and does it, and comes back, he puts out his hand. “Rabbett,” he says, “I’m very fond of you;” and something wistful comes into his eyes, and I sees a faint gray shadow creeping up over his face. “I was always fond of you, and I always shall be fond of you,” says he. “Don’t let my hand go, Rabbett.”