and she had made him stay with her a week,
and petted him, and made much of him and admired him immensely. He was
so sweet-tempered, light-hearted, spirited a lad, that when he went
away, she had hoped to see him often again; but she never did, because
the Earl had been in a bad humor when he went back to Dorincourt,
and had forbidden him ever to go to Lorridaile Park again. But Lady
Lorridaile had always remembered him tenderly, and though she feared he
had made a rash marriage in America, she had been very angry when she
heard how he had been cast off by his father and that no one really knew
where or how he lived. At last there came a rumor of his death, and then
Bevis had been thrown from his horse and killed, and Maurice had died in
Rome of the fever; and soon after came the story of the American child
who was to be found and brought home as Lord Fauntleroy.

"Probably to be ruined as the others were," she said to her husband,
"unless his mother is good enough and has a will of her own to help her
to take care of him."

But when she heard that Cedric's mother had been parted from him she was
almost too indignant for words.

"It is disgraceful, Harry!" she said. "Fancy a child of that age being
taken from his mother, and made the companion of a man like my brother!
He will either be brutal to the boy or indulge him until he is a little
monster. If I thought it would do any good to write----"

"It wouldn't, Constantia," said Sir Harry.

"I know it wouldn't," she answered. "I know his lordship the Earl of
Dorincourt too well;--but it is outrageous."

Not only the poor people and farmers heard about little Lord Fauntleroy;
others knew him. He was talked about so much and there were so many
stories of him--of his beauty, his sweet temper, his popularity, and
his growing influence over the Earl, his grandfather--that rumors of him
reached the gentry at their country places and he was heard of in
more than one county of England. People talked about him at the dinner
tables, ladies pitied his young mother, and wondered if the boy were as
handsome as he was said to be, and men who knew the Earl and his habits
laughed heartily at the stories of the little fellow's belief in his
lordship's amiability. Sir Thomas Asshe of Asshawe Hall, being in
Erleboro one day, met the Earl and his grandson riding together, and
stopped to shake hands with my lord and congratulate him on his change
of looks and on his recovery from the