g--all, perhaps, contributed to soften the lad's heart.
He felt very tenderly and gratefully towards the lady who had received
him so warmly. He was utterly alone and miserable a minute since, and
here was a home and a kind hand held out to him. No wonder he clung to
it. In the hour during which they talked together, the young fellow
had poured out a great deal of his honest heart to the kind new-found
friend; when the dial told breakfast-time, he wondered to think how much
he had told her. She took him to the breakfast-room; she presented
him to his aunt, the Countess, and bade him embrace his cousins. Lord
Castlewood was frank and gracious enough. Honest Will had a headache,
but was utterly unconscious of the proceedings of the past night. The
ladies were very pleasant and polite, as ladies of their fashion know
how to be. How should Harry Warrington, a simple truth-telling lad
from a distant colony, who had only yesterday put his foot upon English
shore, know that my ladies, so smiling and easy in demeanour, were
furious against him, and aghast at the favour with which Madam Bernstein
seemed to regard him?

She was folle of him, talked of no one else, scarce noticed the
Castlewood young people, trotted with him over the house, and told him
all its story, showed him the little room in the courtyard where his
grandfather used to sleep, and a cunning cupboard over the fireplace
which had been made in the time of the Catholic persecutions; drove out
with him in the neighbouring country, and pointed out to him the most
remarkable sites and houses, and had in return the whole of the young
man's story.

This brief biography the kind reader will please to accept, not in
the precise words in which Mr. Harry Warrington delivered it to Madam
Bernstein, but in the form in which it has been cast in the Chapters
next ensuing.

CHAPTER III. The Esmonds in Virginia

Henry Esmond, Esq., an office who had served with the rank of Colonel
during the wars of Queen Anne's reign, found himself, at its close,
compromised in certain attempts for the restoration of the Queen's
family to the throne of these realms. Happily for itself, the nation
preferred another dynasty; but some of the few opponents of the house
of Hanover took refuge out of the three kingdoms, and amongst others,
Colonel Esmond was counselled by his friends to go abroad. As Mr. Esmond
sincerely regretted the part which he had taken, and as the august
Prince who