Oh, my Betty, my Betty! and I am only a little cat, who sits by the fire and thinks, while nobody seems to care or understand how lonely and puzzled I am, and how I long for some kind person to explain. And I could not bear it, but that we loved each other so much that it comforts me to think of it. And I loved her so much, that when I say to myself over and over again what her mamma said to me, it almost makes me happy again—almost, not quite, because I’m so lonely. But if it is true, even a little cat who loved her would be happy for her sake. Betty has gone—where there are always roses. Betty has gone—where there are always roses. HOW FAUNTLEROY OCCURRED _AND A VERY REAL LITTLE BOY BECAME AN IDEAL ONE_ HOW FAUNTLEROY OCCURRED _AND A VERY REAL LITTLE BOY BECAME AN IDEAL ONE_ CHAPTER I HIS ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD It has always been rather interesting to me to remember that he first presented himself in an impenetrable disguise. It was a disguise sufficiently artful to have disarmed the most wary. I, who am not at all a far-sighted person, was completely taken in by him. I saw nothing to warrant in the slightest degree any suspicion that he had descended to earth with practical intentions; that he furtively cherished plans of making himself into the small hero of a book, the picturesque subject of illustrations, the inspiration of a fashion in costume, the very _jeune premier_ in a play over which people in two continents would laugh and cry. Perhaps, in periods before he introduced himself to his family that morning of April 5, 1876, in a certain house in Paris, he may have known all this, and laid out his little plans with adroitness and deliberation; but when I first examined him carefully, as he lay on my arm, looking extremely harmless and extremely fast asleep in his extremely long nightgown, he did not bear at all the aspect of a crafty and designing person; he only looked warm and comfortable, and quite resigned to his situation. He had been clever enough to disguise himself as a baby—a quite new baby, in violet powder and a bald head and a florid complexion. He had even put on small, indefinite features and entirely dispensed with teeth, besides professing inability to speak, a fastidious simplicity of taste in the matter of which limited him to the most innocuous milk diet. But beneath this disguise there he lurked, the small individual who, seven years later—apparently quite artlessly and unconsciously—presented his smiling, ingenuous little face to the big world, and was smiled back upon by it—Little Lord Fauntleroy. He was a quite unromantic little person. Only a prejudiced maternal parent could have picked him out from among seventy-five other babies of the same age; but somehow we always felt that he had a tiny character of his own, and somehow it was always an amusing little character, and one’s natural tendency was to view him in rather a jocular light.