Not very long afterwards she was startled by seeing the old groom who had ridden out with Luke and Charles return with Charles’s riderless horse. What dreadful thing had happened? It was not _the worst_ at all events. No fatal accident had taken her boy from her—but what really had happened it was difficult enough to make out from the servant’s narrative. She could hardly believe that Lord Castlereagh, an old friend of the Teeling family, who was under the most real obligations to Mr. Teeling for his help and support on many occasions, could really have her boy now under arrest in the house of his father-in-law, the Marquis of Hertford. Lord Castlereagh, according to the groom, had with his usual appearance of cordiality and friendship joined the master and Master Charles as they rode up the main street of the town, but when they came to the Marquis’s gates, Master Charles had been asked by his lordship to accompany him. As soon as he had entered the gates, these were closed and an armed guard had suddenly appeared. The master had demanded admission, and this, after a time, was granted. He was only allowed a few minutes with his son. Then he had come out, and leaving orders with the groom to lead home Master Charles’s horse, he had continued his journey alone. She was not left long in doubt of the truth of the old servant’s extraordinary tale. Very shortly afterwards she saw Lord Castlereagh himself enter her house, accompanied by a military guard. Her youngest son, John, a boy of fourteen, daring to demand by what authority the house was thus forcibly entered, saw a pistol presented at his breast, and himself compelled to accompany Castlereagh and his minions in their search through the house for treasonable (?) papers. “My brother,” Charles tells us in his “Narrative,” “conducted himself on this occasion with a firmness and composure that could hardly have been expected from a lad of his years.” It is regrettable that he does not mention the name of the sister “who evinced the most heroic courage; she was my junior, and, with the gentlest, possessed the noblest soul; she has been the solace of her family in all subsequent afflictions, and seemed to have been given as a blessing by Heaven, to counterpoise the ills they were doomed to suffer.” One guesses, however, from the deep affection entertained for her by Charles all through the after years, that this heroic sister was her mother’s namesake, Mary.