Once more the Jesuit twitched up his great eyebrows and muttered something to himself, and then seemed bent in thought. And as Kitty sat watching him she caught disconnected whispers from his lips. "Douglas might do it," she heard him say; "that way the gate would be open. Yet he cannot be spared, not yet," until at last he ceased, after which, looking up from his reverie, he said to her:
"What do you wish to write to him, child? You, the Viscountess Fordingbridge, must have a care as to your epistles to unmarried men."
"Be under no apprehension," she replied. "Yet, if--if--he would pardon me, would send me one little line to say--God!--that he does not hate me--oh! that he who once loved me so should come to hate me--then, then I might again be happy, a little happy. Father, I must write to him."
"So be it," he answered. "Write if you must. I will convey the letter."
[CHAPTER III.]
A WOMAN'S LETTER.
The next night Father Sholto, who was lodged in Lord Fordingbridge's house, took a hackney coach through the fields to Chelsea Church, and so was ferried across to Battersea. Then, because the evening was soft and mild and there was a young moon, he decided to walk on by the road to the next village, namely Wandsworth, which lay half an hour further on.
"Poor Kitty," he thought to himself, as he felt the packet she had confided to him press against his breast, "poor Kitty! Why could she not have believed in Bertie's truth? Surely anything might have been set against the word of such a creature as Simeon Larpent, pupil of mine though he be. Peste! why was not I in Paris when all was happening? By now they would have been happy. They could have lived in France or Italy. We, the Society," and he crossed himself as he went on, "would have found the wherewithal; or even in America they might have, perhaps, been safe. Yet now! Now! Elphinston is a heartbroken man; Kitty, a heartbroken woman. Alas! alas!"
With meditations such as these, for political Scotch Jesuit as Archibald Sholto was, and fierce partisan of his countrymen, Charles Stuart and his father James, there beat a kindly heart within him, he reached the long, straggling village street of Wandsworth. Then, turning off somewhat sharply to the right, he emerged after another five minutes upon a road above the strand of the river, on which, set back in shady gardens, in which grew firs, cedars, and chestnut trees, were some antique and picturesque houses built a hundred years before.
At one of these, the first he came to, he knocked three times on the garden gate and rang a bell, the handle of which was set high in the door frame; and then in a moment a strong, heavy tread was heard coming from the house to the gate.