All the platforms had been removed.  The crucifix no longer glittered overhead, the doors of the cathedral were shut, and none of the pomp of the morning could be seen here now.  But several humble persons were raking amid the ashes where the books had been burnt, as though to see whether some poor fragments might not have been left unconsumed; and when they failed to find even this—­for others had been before them, and the task of burning had probably been well accomplished—­they would put a handful of ashes into some small receptacle, and slip it cautiously into pocket or pouch.

One man, seeing Dalaber’s gaze fixed upon him, went up to him almost defiantly and said: 

“Are you spying upon us poor citizens, to whom is denied aught but the ashes of the bread of life?”

Dalaber looked him full in the face, and spoke the words he had heard from Clarke’s lips the previous evening: 

“Crede et manducasti.”

Instantly the man’s face changed.  A light sprang into his eyes.  He looked round him cautiously, and said in a whisper: 

“You are one of us!”

There was scarce a moment’s pause before Dalaber replied: 

“I am one of you—­in heart and purpose, at least, if not in actual fact.”

He paced home through the streets in a tempest of conflicting emotions.  But his mind was made up.  Come what might—­peril, suffering, or death—­he had put his hand to the plough.  He would not look back.

“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life.”

He seemed to walk to the accompaniment of these words; and when he reached Garret’s house he went straight to the master, told his story, and knelt suddenly down before him.

“Bless me, even me also, O my father!” he exclaimed, in a burst of emotion to which his temperament made him subject, “for I would now be admitted as member of the Association of Christian Brothers.”

Chapter III:  A Neophyte

“And the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and he loved him as his own soul.”

These words often came into the mind of the priest, Thomas Garret, during the three days which Anthony Dalaber spent at his house, hard by the rushing river, in the city of London.

There were ten years in age between them.  Dalaber was a youth who had seen little of life beyond what he had learned in Oxford, whereas Garret had already passed through strange and perilous experiences.  The one had so far lived amongst books, and with youthful companions of his own standing; the other had been a pioneer in one of the most dangerous movements of the day, and had seen what such courses might well lead him to.  Storm and stress had been the portion of the one, a pleasant life of study and pleasure that of the other.  It was only during the past six months that association with Clarke and some others of his way of thinking had aroused in Dalaber’s mind a sense of restless discontent with existing ordinances, and a longing after purer, clearer light, together with a distaste and ofttimes a disgust at what he saw of corruption and simony amongst those who should have been the salt of the earth.