The whole world seemed beautiful to him.

There was some one else who was happy, too,—­an old man, who, though he had been rich and noble all his life, had not often been very honestly happy.  Perhaps, indeed, I shall tell you that I think it was because he was rather better than he had been that he was rather happier.  He had not, indeed, suddenly become as good as Fauntleroy thought him; but, at least, he had begun to love something, and he had several times found a sort of pleasure in doing the kind things which the innocent, kind little heart of a child had suggested,—­and that was a beginning.  And every day he had been more pleased with his son’s wife.  It was true, as the people said, that he was beginning to like her too.  He liked to hear her sweet voice and to see her sweet face; and as he sat in his arm-chair, he used to watch her and listen as she talked to her boy; and he heard loving, gentle words which were new to him, and he began to see why the little fellow who had lived in a New York side street and known grocery-men and made friends with boot-blacks, was still so well-bred and manly a little fellow that he made no one ashamed of him, even when fortune changed him into the heir to an English earldom, living in an English castle.

It was really a very simple thing, after all,—­it was only that he had lived near a kind and gentle heart, and had been taught to think kind thoughts always and to care for others.  It is a very little thing, perhaps, but it is the best thing of all.  He knew nothing of earls and castles; he was quite ignorant of all grand and splendid things; but he was always lovable because he was simple and loving.  To be so is like being born a king.

As the old Earl of Dorincourt looked at him that day, moving about the park among the people, talking to those he knew and making his ready little bow when any one greeted him, entertaining his friends Dick and Mr. Hobbs, or standing near his mother or Miss Herbert listening to their conversation, the old nobleman was very well satisfied with him.  And he had never been better satisfied than he was when they went down to the biggest tent, where the more important tenants of the Dorincourt estate were sitting down to the grand collation of the day.

They were drinking toasts; and, after they had drunk the health of the Earl, with much more enthusiasm than his name had ever been greeted with before, they proposed the health of “Little Lord Fauntleroy.”  And if there had ever been any doubt at all as to whether his lordship was popular or not, it would have been set that instant.  Such a clamor of voices, and such a rattle of glasses and applause!  They had begun to like him so much, those warm-hearted people, that they forgot to feel any restraint before the ladies and gentlemen from the castle, who had come to see them.  They made quite a decent uproar, and one or two motherly women looked tenderly at the little fellow where he stood, with his mother on one side and the Earl on the other, and grew quite moist about the eyes, and said to one another: