“I wish we could have tried and proved it, Mr. Steele,” says Esmond, thinking of his dead benefactor, and his eyes filling with tears.

With the exception of that one cruel letter which he had from his mistress, Mr. Esmond heard nothing from her, and she seemed determined to execute her resolve of parting from him and disowning him.  But he had news of her, such as it was, which Mr. Steele assiduously brought him from the Prince’s and Princess’s Court, where our honest Captain had been advanced to the post of gentleman waiter.  When off duty there, Captain Dick often came to console his friends in captivity; a good nature and a friendly disposition towards all who were in ill-fortune no doubt prompting him to make his visits, and good-fellowship and good wine to prolong them.

“Faith,” says Westbury, “the little scholar was the first to begin the quarrel—­I mind me of it now—­at Lockit’s.  I always hated that fellow Mohun.  What was the real cause, of the quarrel betwixt him and poor Frank?  I would wager ’twas a woman.”

“’Twas a quarrel about play—­on my word, about play,” Harry said.  “My poor lord lost great sums to his guest at Castlewood.  Angry words passed between them; and, though Lord Castlewood was the kindest and most pliable soul alive, his spirit was very high; and hence that meeting which has brought us all here,” says Mr. Esmond, resolved never to acknowledge that there had ever been any other cause but cards for the duel.

“I do not like to use bad words of a nobleman,” says Westbury; “but if my Lord Mohun were a commoner, I would say, ’twas a pity he was not hanged.  He was familiar with dice and women at a time other boys are at school being birched; he was as wicked as the oldest rake, years ere he had done growing; and handled a sword and a foil, and a bloody one, too, before he ever used a razor.  He held poor Will Mountford in talk that night, when bloody Dick Hill ran him through.  He will come to a bad end, will that young lord; and no end is bad enough for him,” says honest Mr. Westbury:  whose prophecy was fulfilled twelve years after, upon that fatal day when Mohun fell, dragging down one of the bravest and greatest gentlemen in England in his fall.

From Mr. Steele, then, who brought the public rumor, as well as his own private intelligence, Esmond learned the movements of his unfortunate mistress.  Steele’s heart was of very inflammable composition; and the gentleman usher spoke in terms of boundless admiration both of the widow (that most beautiful woman, as he said) and of her daughter, who, in the Captain’s eyes, was a still greater paragon.  If the pale widow, whom Captain Richard, in his poetic rapture compared to a Niobe in tears—­to a Sigismunda—­to a weeping Belvidera, was an object the most lovely and pathetic which his eyes had ever beheld, or for which his heart had melted, even her ripened perfections and beauty were as nothing compared to the promise