The man sneered visibly.

“There is no need,” he said.  “It is Mr. Simpson who is to say mass to-morrow, and it is at Tansley that it will be said, at six o’clock in the morning.  If I choose to tell the justices, you cannot prevent it.”  (He turned round in a flare of anger.) “Do you think I shall tell the justices?”

Robin said nothing.

“Do you think I shall tell the justices?” roared the old man insistently.

“No, sir.  Now I do not.”

The other growled gently and sank back.

“But if you think that I will permit my son to flout and to my face in my own hall, and not to trust his own father—­why, you are immeasurably mistaken, sir.  So I ask you again how far you intend to thwart and disobey me.”

A kind of despair surged up in the boy’s heart—­despair at the fruitlessness of this ironical and furious sort of talk; and with the despair came boldness.

“Father, will you let me speak outright, without thinking that I mean to insult you?  I do not; I swear I do not.  Will you let me speak, sir?”

His father growled again a sort of acquiescence, and Robin gathered his forces.  He had prepared a kind of defence that seemed to him reasonable, and he knew that his father was at least just.  They had been friends, these two, always, in an underground sort of way, which was all that the relations of father and son in such days allowed.  The old man was curt, obstinate, and even boisterous in his anger; but there was a kindliness beneath that the boy always perceived—­a kindliness which permitted the son an exceptional freedom of speech, which he used always in the last resort and which he knew his father loved to hear him use.  This, then, was plainly a legitimate occasion for it, and he had prepared himself to make the most of it.  He began formally: 

“Sir,” he said, “you have brought me up in the Old Faith, sent me to mass, and to the priest to learn my duty, and I have obeyed you always.  You have taught me that a man’s duty to God must come before all else—­as our Saviour Himself said, too.  And now you turn on me, and bid me forget all that, and come to church with you....  It is not for me to say anything to my father about his own conscience; I must leave that alone.  But I am bound to speak of mine when occasion rises, and this is one of them....  I should be dishonouring and insulting you, sir, if I did not believe you when you said you would turn Protestant; and a man who says he will turn Protestant has done so already.  It was for this reason, then, and no other, that I did not answer you the other day; not because I wish to be disobedient to you, but because I must be obedient to God.  I did not lie to you, as I might have done, and say that I did not know who the priest was nor where mass was to be said.  But I would not answer, because it is not right or discreet for a Catholic to speak of these things to those who are not Catholics—­”