whom he had loved and worshipped--stood before
him, pursuing him with keen words and aspect malign.

"I wish I were in my lord's place," he groaned out. "It was not my fault
that I was not there, madam. But Fate is stronger than all of us, and
willed what has come to pass. It had been better for me to have died when
I had the illness."

"Yes, Henry," said she--and as she spoke she looked at him with a glance
that was at once so fond and so sad, that the young man, tossing up his
arms, wildly fell back, hiding his head in the coverlet of the bed. As he
turned he struck against the wall with his wounded hand, displacing the
ligature; and he felt the blood rushing again from the wound. He
remembered feeling a secret pleasure at the accident--and thinking,
"Suppose I were to end now, who would grieve for me?"

This haemorrhage, or the grief and despair in which the luckless young man
was at the time of the accident, must have brought on a deliquium
presently; for he had scarce any recollection afterwards, save of some
one, his mistress probably, seizing his hand--and then of the buzzing noise
in his ears as he awoke, with two or three persons of the prison around
his bed, whereon he lay in a pool of blood from his arm.

It was now bandaged up again by the prison surgeon, who happened to be in
the place; and the governor's wife and servant, kind people both, were
with the patient. Esmond saw his mistress still in the room when he awoke
from his trance; but she went away without a word; though the governor's
wife told him that she sat in her room for some time afterward, and did
not leave the prison until she heard that Esmond was likely to do well.

Days afterwards, when Esmond was brought out of a fever which he had, and
which attacked him that night pretty sharply, the honest keeper's wife
brought her patient a handkerchief fresh washed and ironed, and at the
corner of which he recognized his mistress's well-known cipher and
viscountess's crown. "The lady had bound it round his arm when he fainted,
and before she called for help," the keeper's wife said; "poor lady; she
took on sadly about her husband. He has been buried to-day, and a many of
the coaches of the nobility went with him,--my Lord Marlborough's and my
Lord Sunderland's, and many of the officers of the Guards, in which he
served in the old king's time; and my lady has been with her two children
to the king at Kensington, and asked for justice against my Lor