h good things from the dinner; to Briggs, his meek, devoted attendant,
whom he plagued and laughed at; and to his father especially. Here, as he
grew to be about eight years old, his attachment may be said to have
ended. The beautiful mother vision had faded away after a while. During
nearly two years his mother had scarcely spoken to the child. She
disliked him. He had the measles and the whooping cough. He bored her.
One day when he was standing at the landing-place, having crept down from
the upper regions, attracted by the sound of his mother's voice, who was
singing to Lord Steyne, the drawing-room door opening suddenly discovered
the little spy, who but a moment before had been rapt in delight and
listening to the music.

His mother came out and struck him violently a couple of boxes on the
ear. He heard a laugh from the Marquis in the inner room, and fled down
below to his friends of the kitchen, bursting in an agony of grief.

"It is not because it hurts me," little Rawdon gasped out,
"only--only--" sobs and tears wound up the sentence in a storm. It was
the little boy's heart that was bleeding. "Why mayn't I hear her
singing? Why don't she ever sing to me, as she does to that bald-headed
man with the large teeth?" He gasped out at various intervals these
exclamations of grief and rage. The cook looked at the housemaid; the
housemaid looked knowingly at the footman, who all sat in judgment on
Rebecca from that moment.

After this incident the mother's dislike increased to hatred; the
consciousness that the child was in the house was a reproach and a pain
to her. His very sight annoyed her. Fear, doubt, and resistance sprang up
too, in the boy's own bosom.

He and his mother were separated from that day of the boxes on the ear.

Lord Steyne also disliked the boy. When they met he made sarcastic bows
or remarks to the child, or glared at him with savage-looking eyes.
Rawdon used to stare him in the face and double his little fists in
return. Had it not been for his father, the child would have been
desolate indeed, in his own home.

But an unexpected good time came to him a day or two before Christmas,
when he was taken by his father and mother to pass the holidays at
Queen's Crawley. Becky would have liked to leave him at home, but for
Lady Jane's urgent invitation to the youngster; and the symptoms of
revolt and discontent manifested by Rawdon at her neglect of her son. "He
is the finest boy in England," t