And the next minute the gray shadow has changed his brave, handsome, childish face all at once and altogether. He gives me a innocent, bright look—just one, as if he were wondering why I shook so—and shuts his eyes. He would never open them again on me, as was so fond and proud of him in my poor way. When they opened again he would see something brighter than the morning sky, as was just growing red and golden before the east window. * * * * * Of course they fretted over him for a while, finding out most likely as he’d made himself dearer than they’d thought before he were gone. They could not have helped missing him if they had been more careless than they were. Sometimes I fancied the captain was checked a bit and sad, and blamed himself in secret, but his days of being open and soft-hearted was over, and it were hard to tell. I know it was a long time before he forgave Miss Rosie, though for her sake the matter was hushed up, and no one but themselves knew exactly how the accident happened. Miss Rose could never bear the sound of Basil Roscoe’s name again, and she married a good man a few years after, and made him a good wife. So the poor little fellow as gave his life for her did not lose it for nothing, though, if you were to ask me which of the two—but, there, it’s not for me to take on myself to argue out! But he were only a boy to them—only a child. They didn’t know him as I did, and so after a while their grief died out, and in a year or so he was half forgotten. [Illustration: “AND I SHALL ALWAYS BE FOND OF YOU, RABBETT”] But it weren’t so easy for me. His handsome little face and his pleasant ways is as clear to me to-day as they ever was. When I sit lonely over my fire of a winter’s night—and I am a lonely man, things being as they are and the years going on—I think of him for hours in a way of my own, and make a sort of dream of him. I think of him as he lay in his cradle and we made friends when he wasn’t but a week old. I think of him as he was, with his little soldier ways about the quarters, carrying himself as military as if he’d been twenty; a-helping me in one way and another, and finding out he might be confidential, though I wasn’t nothing but a private and him a officer’s son. I think about him as he looked when he came to me in his innercent trouble that night and told me about his sister’s lover. And then I see him lying there, with the light from the east window falling on him, and I hear him saying: “I am very fond of you, Rabbett. I always was fond of you, and I always shall be fond of you. Don’t let my hand go, Rabbett.”