pt tolling (in tones so well remembered), looking back, as all men
will, that revisit their home of childhood, over the great gulf of time,
and surveying himself on the distant bank yonder, a sad little melancholy
boy, with his lord still alive--his dear mistress, a girl yet, her children
sporting around her. Years ago, a boy on that very bed, when she had
blessed him and called him her knight, he had made a vow to be faithful
and never desert her dear service. Had he kept that fond boyish promise?
Yes, before Heaven; yes, praise be to God! His life had been hers; his
blood, his fortune, his name, his whole heart ever since had been hers and
her children's. All night long he was dreaming his boyhood over again, and
waking fitfully; he half fancied he heard Father Holt calling to him from
the next chamber, and that he was coming in and out from the mysterious
window.

Esmond rose up before the dawn, passed into the next room, where the air
was heavy with the odour of the wall-flowers; looked into the brasier
where the papers had been burnt, into the old presses where Holt's books
and papers had been kept, and tried the spring, and whether the window
worked still. The spring had not been touched for years, but yielded at
length, and the whole fabric of the window sank down. He lifted it and it
relapsed into its frame; no one had ever passed thence since Holt used it
sixteen years ago.

Esmond remembered his poor lord saying, on the last day of his life, that
Holt used to come in and out of the house like a ghost, and knew that the
father liked these mysteries, and practised such secret disguises,
entrances, and exits; this was the way the ghost came and went, his pupil
had always conjectured. Esmond closed the casement up again as the dawn
was rising over Castlewood village; he could hear the clinking at the
blacksmith's forge yonder among the trees, across the green, and past the
river, on which a mist still lay sleeping.

Next Esmond opened that long cupboard over the woodwork of the
mantelpiece, big enough to hold a man, and in which Mr. Holt used to keep
sundry secret properties of his. The two swords he remembered so well as a
boy, lay actually there still, and Esmond took them out and wiped them,
with a strange curiosity of emotion. There were a bundle of papers here,
too, which no doubt had been left at Holt's last visit to the place, in my
lord viscount's life, that very day when the priest had been arrested and