llow's interest in his tenantry. He
had never taken any interest in them himself, but it pleased him well
enough that, with all his childish habits of thought and in the midst
of all his childish amusements and high spirits, there should be such a
quaint seriousness working in the curly head.

"There is a place," said Fauntleroy, looking up at him with wide-open,
horror-stricken eye--"Dearest has seen it; it is at the other end of the
village. The houses are close together, and almost falling down; you
can scarcely breathe; and the people are so poor, and everything is
dreadful! Often they have fever, and the children die; and it makes them
wicked to live like that, and be so poor and miserable! It is worse than
Michael and Bridget! The rain comes in at the roof! Dearest went to see
a poor woman who lived there. She would not let me come near her until
she had changed all her things. The tears ran down her cheeks when she
told me about it!"

The tears had come into his own eyes, but he smiled through them.

"I told her you didn't know, and I would tell you," he said. He jumped
down and came and leaned against the Earl's chair. "You can make it all
right," he said, "just as you made it all right for Higgins. You always
make it all right for everybody. I told her you would, and that Newick
must have forgotten to tell you."

The Earl looked down at the hand on his knee. Newick had not forgotten
to tell him; in fact, Newick had spoken to him more than once of the
desperate condition of the end of the village known as Earl's Court.
He knew all about the tumble-down, miserable cottages, and the bad
drainage, and the damp walls and broken windows and leaking roofs,
and all about the poverty, the fever, and the misery. Mr. Mordaunt
had painted it all to him in the strongest words he could use, and his
lordship had used violent language in response; and, when his gout had
been at the worst, he said that the sooner the people of Earl's Court
died and were buried by the parish the better it would be,--and there
was an end of the matter. And yet, as he looked at the small hand on his
knee, and from the small hand to the honest, earnest, frank-eyed face,
he was actually a little ashamed both of Earl's Court and himself.

"What!" he said; "you want to make a builder of model cottages of me,
do you?" And he positively put his own hand upon the childish one and
stroked it.

"Those must be pulled down," said Fauntleroy, with great