e? 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.

Next Esmond opened that long cupboard over the woodwork of the
mantel-piece, big enough to hold a man, and in which Mr. Holt used to
keep sundry secret properties of his. The two swords he remembered so
well as a boy, lay actually there still, and Esmond took them out and
wiped them, with a strange curiosity of emotion. There were a bundle of
papers here, too, which no doubt had been left at Holt's last visit to
the place, in my Lord Viscount's life, that very day when the priest had
been arrested and taken to Hexham Castle. Esmond made free with these
papers, and found treasonable matter of King William's reign, the names
of Charnock and Perkins, Sir John Fenwick and Sir John Friend, Rookwood
and Lodwick, Lords Montgomery and Allesbury, Clarendon and Yarmouth,
that had all been engaged in plots against the usurper; a letter from
the Duke of Berwick too, and one from the King at St. Germains, offering
to confer upon his trusty and well-beloved Francis Viscount Castlewood
the titles of Earl a