One vile and wicked practice he had which he had hidden from all who knew him. He was an opium smoker. He would steal away to London to a garret kept by a mumbling old woman who knew the secret of mixing the drug, and there, stretched on a dirty pallet, sometimes with a drunken Chinaman or a Lascar beside him, would smoke pipe after pipe of the dreadful mixture that stole away his senses and left him worse than before. Hours later he would awake, give the woman money and hurry back to Cloisterham just in time, perhaps, to put on his church robes and lead the cathedral choir. Though no one knew of this, and though Edwin Drood thought his uncle was well-nigh perfect, Rosebud, after she grew up, had no liking for Jasper. He gave her music lessons and every time they met he terrified her. She felt sometimes that he haunted her thoughts like a dreadful ghost. He seemed almost to make a slave of her with his looks, and she felt that in every glance he was telling her that he, Jasper, loved her and yet compelled her to keep silence. But, though disliking the choir master so, and shivering whenever he came near her, Rosebud did not know how to tell Edwin, who she knew loved and believed in Jasper, of her feelings. II THE COMING OF NEVILLE LANDLESS One of the ministers in charge of the cathedral was the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, a ruddy, young, active, honest fellow, who was perpetually practising boxing before the looking-glass or pitching himself head-foremost into all the streams about the town for a swim, even when it was winter and he had to break the ice with his head. Mr. Crisparkle sometimes took young men into his home to live while he tutored them to prepare them for college. One day he received word from a Mr. Luke Honeythunder in London, telling him he was about to bring to Cloisterham a twin brother and sister, Neville and Helena Landless, the young man to be taught by Mr. Crisparkle and his sister Helena to be put in Miss Twinkleton's seminary. This Luke Honeythunder called himself a philanthropist, but he was a queer sort of one, indeed. He was always getting up public meetings and talking loudly, insisting on everybody's thinking exactly as he did, and saying dreadful things of them if they did not. Helena and Neville Landless had been born in Ceylon, where as little children they had been cruelly treated by their stepfather. But they had brave spirits, and four times in six years they had run away, only to be brought back each time and punished. On each of these occasions (the first had been when they were but seven years old) Helena had dressed as a boy and once had even tried to cut off her long hair with Neville's pocket-knife. At length their cruel stepfather died, and they were sent to England, where for no other reason than that his name was continually appearing in the newspapers, Mr. Honeythunder had been appointed their guardian.