That Peregrine’s fate had not been discovered greatly relieved her.  She believed the vault to go down to a considerable depth after a first platform of stone near the opening, and it was generally avoided as the haunt of hobgoblins, fairies, or evil beings, so that no one was likely to be in its immediate neighbourhood after the hay was carried, so that there might have been nothing to attract any one to the near neighbourhood and thus lead to the discovery.  If not made by this time, Charles would be far away, and there was nothing to connect him with the deed.  No one save herself had even known of his having been near the castle that morning.  How strange that the only persons aware of that terrible secret should be so far separated from one another that they could exchange no confidences; and each was compelled to absolute silence.  For as long as no one else was suspected, Anne felt her part must be not to betray Charles, though the bare possibility of the accusation of another was agony to her.

She wrote her condolences in due form to Fareham, and in due time was answered by Lucy Archfield.  The letter was full of details about the infant, who seemed to absorb her and her mother, and to be as likely to live as any child of those days ever was—­and it was in his favour that his grandmother and her old nurse had better notions of management than most of her contemporaries.  In spite of all that Lucy said of her brother’s overwhelming grief, and the melancholy of thus parting with him, there was a strain of cheerfulness throughout the letter, betraying that the poor young wife of less than a year was no very great loss to the peace and comfort of the family.  The letter ended with—­

There is a report that Sir Peregrine Oakshott is dead in Muscovy.  Nothing has been heard of that unfortunate young man at Oakwood.  If he be gone in quest of his uncle, I wonder what will become of him?  However, nurse will have it that this being the third seventh year of his life, the fairies have carried off their changeling—­you remember how she told us the story of his being changed as an infant, when we were children at Winchester; she believes it as much as ever, and never let little Philip out of her sight before he was baptized.  I ask her, if the changeling be gone, where is the true Peregrine? but she only wags her head in answer.

A day or two later Anne heard from her uncle from Oxford.  He was extremely grieved at the condition of his beloved alma mater, with a Roman Catholic Master reigning at University College, a doctor from the Sorbonne and Fellows to match, inflicted by military force on Magdalen, whose lawful children had been ejected with a violence beyond anything that the colleges had suffered even in the time of the Rebellion.  If things went on as they were, he pronounced Oxford would be no better than a Popish seminary:  and he had the more readily induced his old friend to consent to Charles’s desire not to remain there