d Mohun that morning, and
before quitting home had put his affairs into order, and was now quite
ready to abide the issue of the quarrel.

When we had drunk a couple of bottles of sack, a coach was called, and the
three gentlemen went to the Duke's Playhouse, as agreed. The play was one
of Mr. Wycherley's--_Love in a Wood_.

Harry Esmond has thought of that play ever since with a kind of terror,
and of Mrs. Bracegirdle, the actress who performed the girl's part in the
comedy. She was disguised as a page, and came and stood before the
gentlemen as they sat on the stage, and looked over her shoulder with a
pair of arch black eyes, and laughed at my lord, and asked what ailed the
gentlemen from the country, and had he had bad news from Bullock Fair?

Between the acts of the play the gentlemen crossed over and conversed
freely. There were two of Lord Mohun's party, Captain Macartney, in a
military habit, and a gentleman in a suit of blue velvet and silver in a
fair periwig, with a rich fall of point of Venice lace--my lord the Earl of
Warwick and Holland. My lord had a paper of oranges, which he ate and
offered to the actresses, joking with them. And Mrs. Bracegirdle, when my
Lord Mohun said something rude, turned on him, and asked him what he did
there, and whether he and his friends had come to stab anybody else, as
they did poor Will Mountford? My lord's dark face grew darker at this
taunt, and wore a mischievous fatal look. They that saw it remembered it,
and said so afterward.

When the play was ended the two parties joined company; and my Lord
Castlewood then proposed that they should go to a tavern and sup.
Lockit's, the "Greyhound", in Charing Cross, was the house selected. All
six marched together that way; the three lords going ahead, Lord Mohun's
captain, and Colonel Westbury, and Harry Esmond, walking behind them. As
they walked, Westbury told Harry Esmond about his old friend Dick the
Scholar, who had got promotion, and was cornet of the Guards, and had
wrote a book called the _Christian Hero_, and had all the Guards to laugh
at him for his pains, for the Christian Hero was breaking the commandments
constantly, Westbury said, and had fought one or two duels already. And,
in a lower tone, Westbury besought young Mr. Esmond to take no part in the
quarrel. "There was no need for more seconds than one," said the colonel,
"and the captain or Lord Warwick might easily withdraw." But Harry said
no; he was bent on g