Julian flung his cap into the air again as he cried joyously: 

“Why, not even the lord prior himself would know thee now.  Sure, thou mightest almost have ridden past the spies themselves thus habited.  We may push on in open daylight now, and none will heed thy presence.”

Edred had now put on the riding dress which Brother Emmanuel had hitherto worn, so that on their return the same pair might be seen to re-enter the house.  The disguised monk mounted the forest pony and followed his young masters, who pushed on quietly to the coast, feeling a greater and greater security with every mile they put between themselves and their home.

It was the day for the sailing of the sloop that would carry the monk away to a safe retreat.  They were not afraid of losing the boat, for it was not to sail till nightfall; but their impatience acted like a spur, and drove them steadily forward; and save for the needful halts to refresh themselves and their beasts, they did not tarry or draw rein.

It was growing towards the westering of the sun when they beheld the great sea lying before them far below, and Edred’s eyes glowed with joy as he saw the white-winged shallops flitting hither and thither on the wide expanse of blue water, and pictured how soon Brother Emmanuel would be sailing away out of the reach of peril.  Truly God had been very good in hearing and answering prayer.  Edred had, by some instinct for which he could not account, addressed his prayers of late less to the blessed Virgin and more to the Son of God Himself—­struck, perhaps, by the words he had heard from the lips of the heretic peddler about the “one Mediator, the man Christ Jesus.”  He now turned in his saddle and waited till Brother Emmanuel came up.  It was too solitary a place for them to care to keep up the appearance of master and servant.

Riding thus side by side, Brother Emmanuel talked with the boys out of the fulness of his heart.  His week of captivity had been spent in deep and earnest thought, and some of these thoughts were imparted to the boys in that last serious talk.  He bid them hold in all reverence and godly fear that Church which was the body of Christ, and those ordinances which had been given at the beginning for the perfecting of the saints, and which were God’s ways of dealing with man.  But he warned them in solemn tones of the fearful disease which had attacked the body, and which threatened a fearful remedy before that body could be cleansed; he warned them also of the perils which beset the path of those who should live to see the coming struggle.  There would be men who would vow that whatever the Church said and did must be right because the Church was the body of Christ, not knowing that even that body can become corrupt (though never the Head) if the will of man be put in the stead of the will of God; and these would cling to the corruptions as closely as to the ordinances of God, and become bitter persecutors of