might be groundless.

However, the next mail which came from Bruxelles, after Frank had
received his mother's letters there, brought back a joint composition
from himself and his wife, who could spell no better than her young
scapegrace of a husband, full of expressions of thanks, love, and duty
to the Dowager Viscountess, as my poor lady now was styled; and along
with this letter (which was read in a family council, namely, the
Viscountess, Mistress Beatrix, and the writer of this memoir, and which
was pronounced to be vulgar by the maid of honor, and felt to be so by
the other two), there came a private letter for Colonel Esmond from poor
Frank, with another dismal commission for the Colonel to execute, at his
best opportunity; and this was to announce that Frank had seen fit,
"by the exhortation of Mr. Holt, the influence of his Clotilda, and the
blessing of heaven and the saints," says my lord, demurely, "to change
his religion, and be received into the bosom of that church of which
his sovereign, many of his family, and the greater part of the civilized
world, were members." And his lordship added a postscript, of which
Esmond knew the inspiring genius very well, for it had the genuine twang
of the Seminary, and was quite unlike poor Frank's ordinary style of
writing and thinking; in which he reminded Colonel Esmond that he too
was, by birth, of that church; and that his mother and sister should
have his lordship's prayers to the saints (an inestimable benefit,
truly!) for their conversion.

If Esmond had wanted to keep this secret, he could not; for a day or
two after receiving this letter, a notice from Bruxelles appeared in
the Post-Boy and other prints, announcing that "a young Irish lord, the
Viscount C-stlew--d, just come to his majority, and who had served the
last campaigns with great credit, as aide-de-camp to his Grace the Duke
of Marlborough, had declared for the Popish religion at Bruxelles, and
had walked in a procession barefoot, with a wax-taper in his hand." The
notorious Mr. Holt, who had been employed as a Jacobite agent during
the last reign, and many times pardoned by King William, had been, the
Post-Boy said, the agent of this conversion.

The Lady Castlewood was as much cast down by this news as Miss Beatrix
was indignant at it. "So," says she, "Castlewood is no longer a home
for us, mother. Frank's foreign wife will bring her confessor, and there
will be frogs for dinner; and all Tusher's a