“She is quite as well at home at Castlewood,” Esmond’s mistress said, “till everything is over.”

“You shall have your title, Esmond, that I promise you,” says the good Bishop, assuming the airs of a Prime Minister.  “The Prince hath expressed himself most nobly in regard of the little difference of last night, and I promise you he hath listened to my sermon, as well as to that of other folks,” says the Doctor, archly; “he hath every great and generous quality, with perhaps a weakness for the sex which belongs to his family, and hath been known in scores of popular sovereigns from King David downwards.”

“My lord, my lord!” breaks out Lady Esmond, “the levity with which you speak of such conduct towards our sex shocks me, and what you call weakness I call deplorable sin.”

“Sin it is, my dear creature,” says the Bishop, with a shrug, taking snuff; “but consider what a sinner King Solomon was, and in spite of a thousand of wives too.”

“Enough of this, my lord,” says Lady Castlewood, with a fine blush, and walked out of the room very stately.

The Prince entered it presently with a smile on his face, and if he felt any offence against us on the previous night, at present exhibited none.  He offered a hand to each gentleman with great courtesy.  “If all your bishops preach so well as Doctor Atterbury.” says he, “I don’t know, gentlemen, what may happen to me.  I spoke very hastily, my lords, last night, and ask pardon of both of you.  But I must not stay any longer,” says he, “giving umbrage to good friends, or keeping pretty girls away from their homes.  My Lord Bishop hath found a safe place for me, hard by at a curate’s house, whom the Bishop can trust, and whose wife is so ugly as to be beyond all danger; we will decamp into those new quarters, and I leave you, thanking you for a hundred kindnesses here.  Where is my hostess, that I may bid her farewell; to welcome her in a house of my own, soon, I trust, where my friends shall have no cause to quarrel with me.”

Lady Castlewood arrived presently, blushing with great grace, and tears filling her eyes as the Prince graciously saluted her.  She looked so charming and young, that the doctor, in his bantering way, could not help speaking of her beauty to the Prince; whose compliment made her blush, and look more charming still.

CHAPTER XII.

A great scheme, and who balked it.

As characters written with a secret ink come out with the application of fire, and disappear again and leave the paper white, as soon as it is cool; a hundred names of men, high in repute and favoring the Prince’s cause, that were writ in our private lists, would have been visible enough on the great roll of the conspiracy, had it ever been laid open under the sun.  What crowds would have pressed forward, and subscribed their names and protested their loyalty, when the danger