er gazed on.

"And now for my lady," said my lord, going up the stairs, and passing
alone under the tapestry curtain that hung before the drawing-room door.
Esmond always remembered that noble figure, handsomely arrayed in
scarlet. Within the last few months he himself had grown from a boy to be
a man, and with his figure his thoughts had shot up, and grown manly.

After her lord's return, Harry Esmond watched my lady's countenance with
solicitous affection, and noting its sad, depressed look realised that
there was a marked change in her. In her eagerness to please her husband
she practised a hundred arts which had formerly pleased him, charmed him,
but in vain. Her songs did not amuse him, and she hushed them and the
children when in his presence. Her silence annoyed him as much as her
speech; and it seemed as if nothing she could do or say could please him.
But for Harry Esmond his benefactress' sweet face had lost none of its
charms. It had always the kindest of looks and smiles for him; not so gay
and artless perhaps as those which Lady Castlewood had formerly worn, but
out of her griefs and cares, as will happen when trials fall upon a
kindly heart, grew up a number of thoughts and virtues which had never
come into existence, had not her sorrow given birth to them.

When Lady Castlewood found that she had lost the freshness of her
husband's admiration, she turned all her thoughts to the welfare of her
children, learning that she might teach them, and improving her many
natural gifts and accomplishments that she might impart them. She made
herself a good scholar of French, Italian, and Latin. Young Esmond was
house-tutor under her or over her, as it might happen, no more having
been said of his leaving Castlewood since the night before he came down
with the smallpox. During my lord's many absences these school days would
go on uninterruptedly: the mother and daughter learning with surprising
quickness, the latter by fits and starts only, as suited her wayward
humour. As for the little lord, it must be owned that he took after his
father in the matter of learning, liked marbles and play and sport best,
and enjoyed marshalling the village boys, of whom he had a little court;
already flogging them, and domineering over them with a fine imperious
spirit that made his father laugh when he beheld it, and his mother
fondly warn him. Dr. Tusher said he was a young nobleman of gallant
spirit; and Harry Esmond, who was eigh