for Esmond, he felt to be a hundred years old; his dear mistress only seemed unchanged; she looked and welcomed him quite as of old.  There was the fountain in the court babbling its familiar music, the old hall and its furniture, the carved chair my late lord used, the very flagon he drank from.  Esmond’s mistress knew he would like to sleep in the little room he used to occupy; ’twas made ready for him, and wall-flowers and sweet herbs set in the adjoining chamber, the chaplain’s room.

In tears of not unmanly emotion, with prayers of submission to the awful Dispenser of death and life, of good and evil fortune, Mr. Esmond passed a part of that first night at Castlewood, lying awake for many hours as the clock kept 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 of from the mysterious window.

Esmond rose up before the dawn, passed into the next room, where the air was heavy with the odor of the wall-flowers; looked into the brazier 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.