'Smilinda's?' asked Kelly with a frightened glance over his shoulder to Rose, who had the discretion not to meddle in this private conversation.
'Yes,' says Wogan; 'Smilinda's. She gave the stones to you. Very likely they are worth a trifle.'
'We'll slip out and sell them to-morrow,' answered the Parson in a whisper.
They slipped out, but they did not sell them. The diamonds were paste, and Mr. Wogan at last understood why Lady Oxford, when she gave her miniature set with brilliants to the Parson, had been so anxious that he should never part with it.
CHAPTER XXVIII
[MR. WOGAN AGAIN INVADES ENGLAND, MEETS THE ELECT LADY, AND BEARS WITNESS TO HER PERFECTIONS]
It seemed to Wogan that this particular story of the Parson's fortunes, which began in Paris so long ago, had now ended in Paris. But he was wrong, and it was not till ten years after Mr. Kelly's escape from the Tower that Wogan witnessed the last circumstance in England, and himself spoke the closing word.
Retiring soon from Paris, which ill suited a slender purse, Mr. Kelly lived, with his fair wife, at Avignon, where he played secretary to the Duke of Ormond. The Parson was a gêne on the amours of the aged Duke, who posted him off, in the year Forty-Five, to, escort the Prince of Wales to the Scottish islands. Wogan himself, earlier in the same year of grace, lost an arm at the battle of Fontenoy, but got a leaf of the laurels, being dubbed Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis.
His arm amputated and the wound healed, Wogan must needs join the Prince of Wales, then residing in his palace of Holyrood, near Edinburgh. Wogan came too late for that pretty onfall at Prestonpans, but he marched south with the Prince's forces, riding again the old roads from Carlisle to Lancaster and Preston. The buxom maids of the inns were broad-blown landladies now; some of them remembered Wogan; and the ale was as good as ever.
It chanced that at Preston, where he tarried for a couple of days, Mr. Wogan was billeted on a cobbler, a worthy man, but besotted with a new religion, which then caused many popular tumults. To England it had been brought over from America by two brothers of Wogan's old friend, Sam Wesley, the usher at Westminster School, and familiar of Bishop Atterbury.