him."
"I fear, sir," replied the page, "that my Lord Portland would not
like to be disturbed without some clearer information than that."
"Do as you are ordered, sir," replied the gentleman, in a tone of
stern authority, which seemed not a little to surprise his hearer.
"Tell Lord Portland it is a gentleman whose life he saved at the
battle of the Boyne."
The page retired with the air of one who would fain have been sullen
if he had dared; and the stranger remained standing with his hand
upon the table in the middle of the room, the doors closed round him
on all sides, and no one apparently near.
His first thought was one not often indulged in that place, though by
no means an unnatural one. It was a thought, for merely expressing
which, not less than twelve people were once committed to a severe
and lengthened imprisonment by a king of France. "How easy would it
now be," the stranger said mentally, "to kill a king, were one so
minded! Now, God forbid," he added, "that even the attempt of such
an act should ever stain our loyalty to our legitimate sovereign!
Those Romans, those splendid but most barbarous of barbarians, were
certainly the greatest cheats of their own understandings that ever
lived. There was scarcely a crime, a vice, or a folly upon earth,
that they did not hug to their hearts, when they had once gilded it
with a glorious name."
As he thus paused, moralizing, he laid down his hat upon the table,
and brushing back his grey hair from his brow, pressed his hand upon
his forehead as if his head ached, and then dropping it again, mused
for several minutes with his eyes fixed upon the floor. He was only
roused from this deep fit of thought by the door opening suddenly. A
gentleman rather below the middle height, with strong marked
features, and a keen but steadfast eye, entered the room with a paper
in his hand. His eyes were fixed upon the ground as he came in, and
he walked with a firm but somewhat heavy step, as if his limbs did
not move very easily, though he was by no means a man far advanced in
life.
The stranger gazed at him for a moment with a look of inquiry, and
then advanced immediately towards him, bowing with a stately air, and
saying, "My Lord of Portland, since I last saw you, you are somewhat
changed, but perhaps not so much as I am, and therefore I may have to
recall myself to your remembrance; especially as those who confer a
benefit in a moment of haste and tumult, are more likely to forget
the person they obliged, than