Bill Snelling looked on approvingly, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, after passing his fingers, as is the custom of his kind, over his mouth, he said respectfully, but in a tone which conveyed a good deal of latent meaning--“Maybe you’ve seen the morning paper, sir, to-day? There’s summat they tell me in the _Advertiser_ about Rough Diamond. A screw loose there, or somethink. There’s never no being up to them fellows; but it would be d--d bad luck--begging your pardon, sir--so it would, if anything went wrong with the Derby favourite. If ever I saw a colt likely to win the stakes, it’s that ere two-year-old, and--” But we need not follow the irate Bill either in his enthusiastic encomiums on the favourite, or his unqualified abuse of the rascality practised by all patrons, whether gentle or simple (?), of the turf. That there was to be found, however, “_one_ righteous man” in that modern Gomorrah, none knew better than the sapient Bill. He had not lived, man and boy, for more than fifteen years in “master’s stables,” without having made the discovery that the “governor” was one in a thousand. At the Paddocks there were no tricks practised. Rich horsey youths, blinded by their fondly fancied equine knowledge, were never within the precincts of John’s well-ordered establishment beguiled to their undoing. Latent unsoundness was _there_ never concealed, nor incipient vice guarded as a secret. All was fair and above-board, as all the world (the knowing ones with a certain alloy of contempt) were willing to acknowledge, in the breeding-stud of trustworthy John Beacham. Trustworthy! O, if it be indeed true that justice is so little tempered with mercy, that for every idle and involuntary thought, as well as for every evil deed, we are to be held alike accountable; if to covet be as punishable as to steal; if to look with eyes of _convoitise_ at our neighbour’s giddy wife is tantamount to the breaking of the seventh commandment; and if to hate our brother is to be a murderer, why then I greatly fear that erring John Beacham sinned on that bright April morning one of the sins that are “to death.” For, when he turned away after his short dialogue with communicative Bill Snelling, there was an added amount of hatred in his heart towards the owner of the Derby favourite. Proud as he was of his “stock,” had any other man than the Colonel been the possessor of Rough Diamond, he would have rejoiced in his probable success; but, matters standing as they did, the honest man could almost have found it in his heart to _pray_ that the Winner of the Great Race that year should be any horse rather than the one which Arthur Vavasour purchased some ten months previously of himself, and which that young gentleman soon afterwards, under peculiar circumstances, and without profit, disposed of to Colonel Frederick Norcott, formerly of the 26th Dragoons, and now of 14 Stanwick-street, London. CHAPTER XVII. HUMBLE LOVE.