“I am afraid I must disturb him,” said the stranger.  “My business is of too much importance to his lordship to wait till to-morrow morning.”

The porter then gave the speaker another look:  the dress, the demeanour, the horses, the attendants, were all such as commanded respect, although he did not recollect the stranger’s face.  “Well, sir,” he said, “if you will come in, I will have his lordship informed.”

The stranger nodded his head, and turning to his followers, bade them take away the horses.  “I will walk back,” he said, and then following the porter, entered the palace.  The janitor led him onward through some large folding doors to a room where two or three servants were sitting, into whose hands he delivered him, bidding one of them conduct him to the page in waiting.  This was speedily done; and the page, on being informed of the stranger’s desire, again examined him somewhat curiously, and asked his name.

“That matters not,” replied the stranger.  “Tell him merely that it is a gentleman to whom he rendered great service many years ago, and who has now important intelligence to give 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.