l not doubt your success; and now, are
you going back to Beaufort House? If so, I will bear you company on
the way."
Wilton replied in the affirmative, and they accordingly left the
house of the Earl of Sunbury. Wilton, however, had to procure his
horse; and Green also was delayed, for a moment, by the same piece of
business. When all was prepared, he seemed to hesitate and pause
before he mounted; and while he yet remained speaking, with his foot
in the stirrup, a boy ran up, saying, "I have just been down, sir,
and seen him go in."
Green gave him a note which he had held in his hand during the whole
conversation at Lord Sunbury's, saying, "Take him that note! Tell the
servant to deliver it immediately. If Lord Sherbrooke asks who sent
it, tell him it was the gentleman who wrote it, and who hopes to meet
him at the appointed place." The boy ran off with the note as fast as
he could go, and Wilton and his companion turned their horses' heads
towards Chelsea.
What he had heard certainly did surprise Wilton a good deal; and he
did not scruple to say, "You seem acquainted with every one, I think,
and to have an acquaintance with many of whom I did not know you had
the slightest knowledge."
"It is so," answered Green, in a grave and thoughtful tone, "and yet
nothing wonderful. It is with a man like me as with nature," he added
with a smile, "we both work secretly. Things seem extraordinary,
strange, almost miraculous, when beheld only in their results, but
when looked at near, they are found to be brought about by the
simplest of all possible means. You, having lived but little in the
world, and not being one half my age, yet know thousands of people in
the highest ranks of life that I do not know, though I have mingled
with that rank ten times as much as you have done: and I know many
whom you would think the last to hold acquaintance with me in these
changed times. You could go into any thronged assembly, a theatre, a
ball-room, a house of parliament, and point me out, by hundreds,
people with whose persons I am utterly unacquainted, and these would
be the greatest men of the day.
"But I could lay my finger upon this wily statesman, or that great
warrior, or the other stern philosopher, and could tell you secrets
of those men's bosoms which would astonish you to hear, and make them
shrink into the ground;--and yet there would be no magic in all
this."
Wilton did not answer him in the same moralizing strain, but strove
to obtain some farther information