Presently, dinner being ended, the ladies left the men of the party to their wine, and retired to the drawing-room. A knock at the front door, followed by the _frou-frou_ of silks and the murmur of feminine voices in the hall, announced the advent of after-dinner visitors. At the proposal of the younger brother of the host, the political discussion which the three men had inaugurated over their port was postponed, and a dish of tea with the ladies in the drawing-room was suggested. The dark eyes of the master of the house were full of merriment, while he explained to the guest what the magnet was that drew John from his politics. As the voices floated past them in the hall there had been clearly discernible the silvery tones of their beautiful neighbour, Miss Maria Steele. “You should hear some of the poetry he addresses to his Stella, Captain Armstrong!” said the host in laughing tones. Captain Armstrong! Captain Warneford Armstrong! We know now, with that name ringing in our ears, that darker than the tragedy of Lord Edward, lying wounded to death in his prison cell at Newgate, is the tragedy that is being enacted before our eyes in this pleasant hospitable house. In this handsome dining-room, around the gleaming mahogany with its genial burden of fruit and wine, there sit—the informer, Captain John Warneford Armstrong, and his victims, Henry and John Sheares! And presently, if we have the courage to face it, and will follow the three men in their passage to the ladies in the drawing-room, we shall see an even more harrowing spectacle. For in that charming eighteenth-century room, all full of May sweetness from the tall open windows, all full of lovely ladies and beautiful children in their picturesque eighteenth-century costume, we shall presently see the traitor gather the two little children of Henry Sheares upon his knee, while their mother tunes her harp, and sings in her glorious voice, some exquisite, moving strain for his delectation.[28] It is the picture which the genius of Curran has made immortal: “I am disposed to believe, shocking as it is,” he cried, while he turned to the Jury, in the dim light of the ghastly midnight court where the Sheareses stood, two months later, on trial for their lives, “that this witness had the heart, when he was surrounded by the little progeny of my client—when he was sitting in the mansion in which he was hospitably entertained—when he saw the old mother, supported by the piety of her son, and the children basking in the parental fondness of the father—that he saw the scene, and smiled at it—contemplated the havoc he was to make, consigning them to the storms of a miserable world, without having an anchorage in the kindness of a father. Can such horror exist, and not waken the rooted vengeance of an eternal God?” Footnote 28: