What Hector’s business in life was, beyond shaving Colonel Tremaine once a day, Lyddon had never been able to discover. Colonel Tremaine always said, “my boy Hector,” although, like the colonel himself, he had passed the line of seventy; but having become the colonel’s personal attendant when both were in their boyhood, he remained “my boy, sir,” until Time should hand him over, a graybeard, to Death. Another anomaly, scarcely stranger to Lyddon than Hector’s eternal boyhood, was that, having an incurable propensity to look upon the wine when it is red, he had entire charge of the cellar at Harrowby, and when upon occasions of ceremony his services might have been of some slight use, he was tolerably sure to be a little more than half-seas over. He made up for this by an Argus-eyed vigilance over his two postulates, Jim Henry and Tasso, gingerbread-colored youths, who did the work of the dining room under Hector’s iron rule. So careful was he of their morals that he made a point of himself drinking the wine left in the glasses at dinner, “jes’ to keep dem wuffless black niggers f’um turnin’ deyselves into drunkards, like Joshua did arter he got outen de ark.” Now, from Hector’s unctuous voice and unsteady gait, it was perfectly obvious to Lyddon that Hector had not escaped the pitfall into which he alleged Joshua had fallen. Lyddon passed along and entered the great hall, where the work of putting up the Christmas decorations was not yet finished. A noble fire roared upon the broad hearth and the rose-red light danced upon the darkened, polished leaves of the holly wreaths, which hung on the walls and the family portraits that seemed still to live and speak. Before the fireplace stood Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, with Archie, the sixteen-year-old son, who, with exception of Angela Vaughn, a slip of a girl older than Archie, was the best pupil Lyddon had ever known. Lyddon himself, with the abstracted eyes of a scholar and an observer of men, walked up to the fireplace and listened with patient amusement to the perplexities of Mrs. Tremaine.