e Earl knitted his brows.

"Do you NEVER forget about your mother?" he said.

"No," answered Fauntleroy, "never; and she never forgets about me.
I shouldn't forget about YOU, you know, if I didn't live with you. I
should think about you all the more."

"Upon my word," said the Earl, after looking at him a moment longer, "I
believe you would!"

The jealous pang that came when the boy spoke so of his mother seemed
even stronger than it had been before; it was stronger because of this
old man's increasing affection for the boy.

But it was not long before he had other pangs, so much harder to face
that he almost forgot, for the time, he had ever hated his son's wife at
all. And in a strange and startling way it happened. One evening, just
before the Earl's Court cottages were completed, there was a grand
dinner party at Dorincourt. There had not been such a party at the
Castle for a long time. A few days before it took place, Sir Harry
Lorridaile and Lady Lorridaile, who was the Earl's only sister, actually
came for a visit--a thing which caused the greatest excitement in the
village and set Mrs. Dibble's shop-bell tinkling madly again, because
it was well known that Lady Lorridaile had only been to Dorincourt once
since her marriage, thirty-five years before. She was a handsome old
lady with white curls and dimpled, peachy cheeks, and she was as good
as gold, but she had never approved of her brother any more than did the
rest of the world, and having a strong will of her own and not being
at all afraid to speak her mind frankly, she had, after several lively
quarrels with his lordship, seen very little of him since her young
days.

She had heard a great deal of him that was not pleasant through the
years in which they had been separated. She had heard about his neglect
of his wife, and of the poor lady's death; and of his indifference to
his children; and of the two weak, vicious, unprepossessing elder boys
who had been no credit to him or to any one else. Those two elder
sons, Bevis and Maurice, she had never seen; but once there had come to
Lorridaile Park a tall, stalwart, beautiful young fellow about eighteen
years old, who had told her that he was her nephew Cedric Errol, and
that he had come to see her because he was passing near the place and
wished to look at his Aunt Constantia of whom he had heard his mother
speak. Lady Lorridaile's kind heart had warmed through and through at
the sight of the young man,