may be that he is already enjoying by anticipation the envy of Jeffs, who is a great amateur carpenter, bricklayer, and builder, with pronounced tastes in favour also of plumbing and glazing.

But he has been deprived of one great source of comfort. That kindly housemaid, who was always pampering him and coddling him and inclined to injure his constitution by a surfeit of kitchen delicacies, has now gone away from Burchell Hall. She had given warning some time previous; the work was too much for her, she alleged; and, moreover, a loving shoemaker had persuaded her to share his fate. I think, however, had it been possible, she would have given him up and remained in Dr. Rawson's service. She was in quite an agony of terror when she parted from her little boy-friend. She gave him an old pair of scissors as a parting tribute of her ceaseless regard; while he bestowed upon her a drawing of a crusader—a treasure of tinsel, and vermilion, and Prussian blue. How delighted she was with it! what a wondrous work of art she deemed it! and shut it up in her Prayer-Book, vowing never, never, never, to part with it-no, not for all the gold in the world.

For the boy has another resource, from which he never fails to derive amusement. Those dingy, supple fingers of his are really skilful. He is the artist of the school. Nearly every pupil took home, amidst other treasures, in his "play-box," a specimen of the art-talent of" the boy who stopped the holidays." Many of the schoolbooks were arabesqued with his designs. What severe canings he had earned by reason of those misplaced evidences of his skill! He is for ever drawing all sorts of things, but chiefly chivalresque and historical subjects, upon every scrap of paper he can procure, or carving with his knife, or moulding a lump of putty, purloined from the glazier, into a strange variety of figures—a favourite one being a caricature of the Doctor, only he dares not permit the material to harden, retaining that form; it would be too dangerous; it would too surely secure to him a flogging; so he crushes up again the effigy into a shapeless mass, and then begins with it to fashion a semblance of the French usher.

In the playground he has thrown a stone at a favourite mark, and hit it. He has commenced yet once again to carve his initials (N. R.) upon a deal door opening on the meadow at the back of the house; he has wound up a small peg-top (a "boxer"), produced from his pocket, and

it very adroitly, supporting it, as it revolves, now on the back, now on the palm of his hand; he has given one or two delicate carvings with the small blade of his knife, specially sharpened for the purpose, to a little model of a ship's hull, also contained as a constant companion in his pocket. Then he has sauntered in-doors again, and is soon busy with a new portrait-about the thousandth-of his dear friend Wilfred of Ivanhoe, in a splendid suit of Milan armour, drawn upon the title-page of a thumbed school-copy of the Anabasis of Xenophon.

Presently he is disturbed in his labour of love; just as he is nigglingin the details of the hero's chain-mail, a light step is heard, and a woman

enters, rather timidly, looking round her curiously. She starts back, however, when she sees the boy, with a little cry of surprise. She had probably expected to find the room empty.

"Oh, I beg yer pardin," she says, with a spasmodic curtsey, as she prepares to retreat precipitately.

"Hi! hullo! Come here!" says the boy, with quite a boy's composure and self-possession.

The woman is reassured; certainly there is nothing very alarming about the appearance of the little man.

"You're the new housemaid? Come instead of Mary, haven't you?" "Yes, please, I have."

She was a short, stout, round-edged young woman, with a healthy russet complexion, and eyes so black that there was in them no very perceptible difference between the iris and the pupil.

"Wish you joy! You've got into a good thing! Mary was nearly killed with the work-she was; told me so herself, often; and" (lowering his voice) "perhaps the Doctor isn't a Turk. Oh, dear, no, not at all."

"I know I shan't like it," said the young woman, with doleful acquiescence; "why the scouring alone, in such a house as this-and I haven't half been over it yet-is one person's work. I stumbled as I came up the doorstep; that's unlucky, and set me against the place at once. And my nose has been itching frightful all the morning, and that signifies a secret enemy somewhere, according to my fortune-telling book. I'm sure I sha'n't like it; and I wish I'd never come."

She spoke with a midland-county accent, not possible to be rendered in writing by any amount of strange or uncouth spelling.

Friendly and confidential relations were thus established between the new housemaid and the schoolboy.

"May I look?" she asked. "Oh, what a lovely drawing!"

"I'll give you one like it, some day," says the boy loftily. “What's your name?"

"Susan Mann. But I'm called Sue mostly. May I ask yours, please?" "Well, yes, Susan Mann. You'd be sure to know my name sooner or later, so I may as well tell you now. My name is Reeve,-Noel Reeve." "I suppose, Master Reeve, you made a mistake coming away from home too soon-before the holidays were over?"

"Home! This is my home. I haven't got any other. I spent one Christmas at little Parker's house in the country. He was a good little fellow, was little Parker. You'll see his name cut on the shutter in the junior schoolroom. Didn't the Doctor lick me for it, just! Oh, not at all! But little Parker died of scarlet-fever,-I was so sorry,-and of course they didn't have me at his house any more. So I always stop the holidays." "What! Haven't you got no father, Master Reeve ?"

"No."

"Nor no mother?"

The boy shook his head; and then, perhaps a little annoyed at Susan

Mann's questions, turned away to add a pair of mustachios to Wilfred of Ivanhoe.

"Lor', poor dear!" said Susan. "Why, you're worse off nor me. I come out of the coal-country, you know. Perhaps you could guess as much from my talk, which isn't like people's near London. This is only my third place since I left Sunday-school. Father was a collier. Perhaps you never heard of Grimstone's pit? Dare say not; though it's well enough known down in my part of the country. Father worked in Grimstone's colliery. He died along of the fire-damp, with nine other men. There was a explosion. I was only two years old at the time. He was awful shattered; broken to bits, poor man. They had to pick him up,what they could find of him,-and carry him home in a bag. Mother was knocked all foolish when she saw him, and never got over it. And just then brother Jim was born, and he's been but a poor creature all his life,-rather queer and crazy like. Can't do much more nor laugh and twitter with his fingers, and chevy sparrows; and it's hard to get a living out of that. Folks subscribed for mother. Poor soul! she never was the same woman again, I'm told, and went out at last like a snuff of candle. And the parish helped; and I send all my wages I can to keep Jim decent, and they do what they can for him about the pit, and try to employ him; but he's a poor creature is Jim, worse luck."

Sincere interest and sympathy sparkled in the boy's big gray eyes as he listened to his new friend's recital; and then he fell to considering whether a fire-damp explosion, and nine colliers "blown to bits," would not make rather an effective subject for art-illustration.

"How long have you been here, may I be so bold as to ask, Master Reeve?"

"Eight years, counting this next half. I was at a preparatory-school before."

"And no holidays! Don't you get very moped and miserable?"

"Well, I do at times. It's better when the boys come back. They're very kind at first, and very glad to see me, and give me lots of cake, and gingerbread, and jam, and that. But afterwards-"

"Yes, afterwards?"

"Well, afterwards," said the boy, the colour rising in his cheeks, "they take to calling names sometimes-ill names-because I've no father and mother, and don't remember any thing, and can't tell any thing about them. That's hard to bear, if you like.”

And he turned away.

"Poor dear!" murmured the young woman from the coal-country tenderly; and I think, if she had dared,-but there was something so grave, so calm, so dignified almost, about the boy's manner, that she was awed and restrained in spite of herself,-she would have taken him in her robust arms and kissed him;-"a love-child, I suppose. And yet he's a gentleman. One can see that at once. Though he might be cleaner, certainly, specially about the hands. Yet how clever he is with them!

To think that he should draw like that, and such a mere child to look at, poor dear!"

"And haven't you no guardian, nor nothing?" she inquired, after a pause.

"Well, yes, I have a sort of guardian, I suppose; but he don't come here often. I haven't seen him for more than a year."

"And his name?"

"I don't know his name."

66

And with crimson cheeks he turned again to his art-labours. "Which do you like best," Susan asked softly, after a pause; sugared bread-and-butter or buttered toast?"

But a heavy tread was heard in the passage.

"Hush! Cave!" said the boy, with an alarmed look. "The Doctor's come out of his study."

So Susan made her escape.

CHAPTER II.

CLARE.

PRESENTLY all danger had subsided. The Doctor had withdrawn again into the retirement of his study,-an apartment principally useful to him inasmuch as he there stored his books and his canes, and, for his greater comfort, it was maliciously whispered, a stock of cigars also, and a snug case of liquors; the large globes in the embrasures of the windows, the enormous maps upon the walls, and the shelves upon shelves of books on each side of the fireplace, being rather so many "properties" aiding in the general decoration of the scene, than sources of knowledge and stores of information to which he was wont to have recourse with any particular frequency.

Once more secure, therefore, in his solitary liberty, and having completed his portrait of the Disinherited Knight,-with a determination upon some future occasion to produce a companion-work containing a representation of that rival warrior, the Templar, Sir Brian de Bois Gilbert, Noel Reeve strolled once more out of the schoolroom and surveyed the hall. Ladders leant against the walls, pails and brushes and paint-pots were about the floor, and there was an arrangement of scaffolding-poles and planks affording the means of reaching the ceiling; but the workmen were absent-one of those periods of the day having arrived which the labouring-classes of the community are accustomed to dedicate especially to the purposes of refreshment, and therefore to reverence by abstaining altogether from toil with a scrupulosity almost superstitious. To have a ladder before him and not to mount it, to stand over a pail of whitewash and not to stir up the mixture and mess about with it generally, were more than could be expected from the nature of boyhood; and forthwith Noel Reeve had climbed to the ceiling, and was to be seen wielding a formidable "double-tie" brush, splashing above him, and spattering himself and his clothes in a dreadful way. His hair was whitened,

like a Belgravian footman's; while his jacket looked as though it had been stuck all over with white wafers. Yet he was enjoying himself intensely, and he prosecuted his self-imposed task with an amazing vigour.

Then he stopped, suddenly startled. A long ringing crow of delight -a child's laugh, silvery and musical as the song of a skylark-struck upon his ear. He turned and looked down. Below, hardly out of the range of the showerings of his brush, there stood a little girl, watching him, and extremely amused. There was something electrical about her merriment. At first he had been rather inclined to be indignant, being possessed with quite a boy's contempt for the youth of the gentler sex, and indisposed to view her criticism with any respect, or to attach to it any importance. But the laughing child was irresistible. He felt constrained to admit that his situation had about it something ludicrous. So he smiled, then laughed aloud, and ultimately was so shaken by his mirth that he was very nearly losing his hold of the ladder and falling on the floor.

"Oh, you dirty boy! What a mess you are making! Shall I get up there and help you?"

She was perhaps under the age of the boy, very little and fair and delicate-looking, with a thick rippling flood of silky hair, pale-gold in hue, falling from under her jaunty little rice-straw hat, on to her shoulders, down to her waist. Such blue eyes!-enriched in colour by the shadow that fell upon them from her long, close, up-curving eyelashes. Such a little double-cherry of a mouth, showing, as she laughed, such neat twin strings of pearls within! Her complexion exquisitely fair; perhaps -she was such a child-the tinge of colour in her cheeks just a little too faint and unpronounced, though it added to the something fantastic and fairy-like there was about her appearance. She was richly dressed, but in light soft colours. A dress of sea-green silk, shot with silvery gray, white Cashmere mantle, with lace about her neck, and jasmin-flowers in her hat, with the tiniest shiny boots upon her small feet, and lustrous silk stockings upon her slim dainty little legs. She had not arrived at that age when it is considered necessary by society that those limbs should be concealed by lengthened draperies, to be revealed only when accident insists, or the exigencies of the carriage-steps, the staircase, or the streetcrossing demand. In one hand she carried a small bouquet of flowers, dexterously grouped; in the other a diminutive parasol of white silk, decked with a bow and streamers of ribbon, and a full and rich fringe. She was so charming in appearance altogether, that I have a difficulty in finding any thing pretty enough to which to liken her. But there was about her the effect of a jewel of price exquisitely set; or, better still, something in the way of the most precious of chimney-ornaments, let us say. I am sure I have seen some priceless article of Dresden or biscuit which came near her in beauty of form and refinement of colour.

The Doctor made his appearance at the door of his study.