es_ was a Jesuit as they said.)

"Perhaps you are right," says the other, reading his thoughts quite as he
used to do in old days: "you were all but killed at Hochstedt of a wound
in the left side. You were before that at Vigo, aide de camp to the Duke
of Ormonde. You got your company the other day after Ramillies; your
general and the prince-duke are not friends; he is of the Webbs of Lydiard
Tregoze, in the county of York, a relation of my Lord St. John. Your
cousin, Monsieur de Castlewood, served his first campaign this year in the
Guard; yes, I do know a few things as you see."

Captain Esmond laughed in his turn. "You have indeed a curious knowledge,"
he says. A foible of Mr. Holt's, who did know more about books and men
than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience;
thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but
not quite. Esmond's wound was in the right side, not the left, his first
general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of
Yorkshire; and so forth. Esmond did not think fit to correct his old
master in these trifling blunders, but they served to give him a knowledge
of the other's character, and he smiled to think that this was his oracle
of early days; only now no longer infallible or divine.

"Yes," continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, "for a man who has not
been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London very
well. The old dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood's father. Do you know that
your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop of Southampton, and
that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same imposition? The Princess
Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the king returns, Collier will
be an archbishop."

"Amen!" says Esmond, laughing; "and I hope to see your eminence no longer
in jack-boots, but red stockings, at Whitehall."

"You are always with us--I know that--I heard of that when you were at
Cambridge; so was the late lord; so is the young viscount."

"And so was my father before me," said Mr. Esmond, looking calmly at the
other, who did not, however, show the least sign of intelligence in his
impenetrable grey eyes--how well Harry remembered them and their look! only
crows' feet were wrinkled round them--marks of black old Time had settled
there.

Esmond's face chose to show no more sign of meaning than the father's.
There may have been on the one side and the other just the faintest
gl