ost likely stained his
mother's honour and his own.

"Did you love my Lord Castlewood?"

"I wait until I know my mother, sir, to say," the boy answered, his eyes
filling with tears.

"Something has happened to Lord Castlewood," Captain Westbury said, in a
vary grave tone--"something which must happen to us all. He is dead of a
wound received at the Boyne, fighting for King James."

"I am glad my lord fought for the right cause," the boy said.

"It was better to meet death on the field like a man, than face it on
Tower Hill, as some of them may," continued Mr. Westbury. "I hope he has
made some testament, or provided for thee somehow. This letter says, he
recommends _unicum filium suum dilectissimum_ to his lady. I hope he has
left you more than that."

Harry did not know, he said. He was in the hands of Heaven and Fate; but
more lonely now, as it seemed to him, than he had been all the rest of his
life; and that night, as he lay in his little room which he still
occupied, the boy thought with many a pang of shame and grief of his
strange and solitary condition:--how he had a father and no father; a
nameless mother that had been brought to ruin, perhaps, by that very
father whom Harry could only acknowledge in secret and with a blush, and
whom he could neither love nor revere. And he sickened to think how Father
Holt, a stranger, and two or three soldiers, his acquaintances of the last
six weeks, were the only friends he had in the great wide world, where he
was now quite alone. The soul of the boy was full of love, and he longed
as he lay in the darkness there for some one upon whom he could bestow it.
He remembers, and must to his dying day, the thoughts and tears of that
long night, the hours tolling through it. Who was he and what? Why here
rather than elsewhere? I have a mind, he thought, to go to that priest at
Trim, and find out what my father said to him on his death-bed confession.
Is there any child in the whole world so unprotected as I am? Shall I get
up and quit this place, and run to Ireland? With these thoughts and tears
the lad passed that night away until he wept himself to sleep.

The next day, the gentlemen of the guard who had heard what had befallen
him were more than usually kind to the child, especially his friend
Scholar Dick, who told him about his own father's death, which had
happened when Dick was a child at Dublin, not quite five years of age.
"That was the first sensation of grief," D