him as extra body-servant, having had a good
account of his capabilities; he had taken the hound to his own kennels.

Now, the fellow had been thoroughly devil-may-care throughout the
whole course of the proceedings, had heard his sentence with sublime
impudence, and had chaffed his sentinels with an utterly reckless
nonchalance; but somehow or other, when that message reached him, a
vivid sense that he was a condemned and disgraced man suddenly flooded
in on him; a passionate gratitude seized him to the young aristocrat
who had thought of him in his destitution and condemnation, who had even
thought of his dog; and Rake the philosophic and undauntable, could
have found it in his heart to kneel down in the dust and kiss the
stirrup-leather when he held it for his new master, so strong was the
loyalty he bore from that moment to Bertie.

Martinets were scandalized at a Life-Guardsman taking as his private
valet a man who had been guilty of such conduct in the Light Cavalry;
but Cecil never troubled his head about what people said; and so
invaluable did Rake speedily become to him that he had kept him about
his person wherever he went from then until now, two years after.

Rake loved his master with a fidelity very rare in these days; he loved
his horses, his dogs, everything that was his, down to his very rifle
and boots; slaved for him cheerfully, and was as proud of the deer he
stalked, of the brace he bagged, of his winnings when the Household
played the Zingari, or his victory when his yacht won the Cherbourg Cup,
as though those successes had been Rake's own.

"My dear Seraph," said Cecil himself once, on this point, to the
Marquis, "if you want generosity, fidelity, and all the rest of the
cardinal what-d'ye-call-'ems--sins, ain't it?--go to a noble-hearted
Scamp; he'll stick to you till he kills himself. If you want to be
cheated, get a Respectable Immaculate; he'll swindle you piously, and
decamp with your Doncaster Vase."

And Rake, who assuredly had been an out-and-out scamp, made good
Bertie's creed; he "stuck to him" devoutly, and no terrier was ever more
alive to an otter than he was to the Guardsman's interests. It was that
very vigilance which made him, as he rode back from the Zu-Zu's in
the twilight, notice what would have escaped any save one who had been
practiced as a trapper in the red Canadian woods; namely, the head of a
man, almost hidden among the heavy, though leafless, brushwood and
the ye