As had been arranged between the prisoner and his counsel in their consultations, Mr. Steele had gone to the dowager’s house in Chelsey, where it has been said the widow and her orphans were, had seen my Lady Viscountess, and pleaded the cause of her unfortunate kinsman.  “And I think I spoke well, my poor boy,” says Mr. Steele; “for who would not speak well in such a cause, and before so beautiful a judge?  I did not see the lovely Beatrix (sure her famous namesake of Florence was never half so beautiful), only the young Viscount was in the room with the Lord Churchill, my Lord of Marlborough’s eldest son.  But these young gentlemen went off to the garden; I could see them from the window tilting at each other with poles in a mimic tournament (grief touches the young but lightly, and I remember that I beat a drum at the coffin of my own father).  My Lady Viscountess looked out at the two boys at their game and said—­’You see, sir, children are taught to use weapons of death as toys, and to make a sport of murder;’ and as she spoke she looked so lovely, and stood there in herself so sad and beautiful, an instance of that doctrine whereof I am a humble preacher, that had I not dedicated my little volume of the ’Christian Hero’—­(I perceive, Harry, thou hast not cut the leaves of it.  The sermon is good, believe me, though the preacher’s life may not answer it)—­I say, hadn’t I dedicated the volume to Lord Cutts, I would have asked permission to place her ladyship’s name on the first page.  I think I never saw such a beautiful violet as that of her eyes, Harry.  Her complexion is of the pink of the blush-rose, she hath an exquisite turned wrist and dimpled hand, and I make no doubt—­”

“Did you come to tell me about the dimples on my lady’s hand?” broke out Mr. Esmond, sadly.

“A lovely creature in affliction seems always doubly beautiful to me,” says the poor Captain, who indeed was but too often in a state to see double, and so checked he resumed the interrupted thread of his story.  “As I spoke my business,” Mr. Steele said, “and narrated to your mistress what all the world knows, and the other side hath been eager to acknowledge—­that you had tried to put yourself between the two lords, and to take your patron’s quarrel on your own point; I recounted the general praises of your gallantry, besides my Lord Mohun’s particular testimony to it; I thought the widow listened with some interest, and her eyes—­I have never seen such a violet, Harry—­looked up at mine once or twice.  But after I had spoken on this theme for a while she suddenly broke away with a cry of grief.  ‘I would to God, sir,’ she said, ’I had never heard that word gallantry which you use, or known the meaning of it.  My lord might have been here but for that; my home might be happy; my poor boy have a father.  It was what you gentlemen call gallantry came into my home, and drove my husband on to the cruel sword that killed him.  You should not speak the word to a Christian woman, sir, a poor widowed mother of orphans, whose home was happy until the world came into it—­the wicked godless world, that takes the blood of the innocent, and lets the guilty go free.’