before him.  He dined at twelve, he supped at six, he said his prayers, and blessed himself when no strangers were by.  He was something of a herbalist, as a sheer hobby of his own; he went to feed his falcons in the morning, he rode with them after dinner (from last August he had found himself riding north more often than south, since Marjorie lived in that quarter); and now all had been crowned last Christmas Eve, when in the enclosed garden at her house he had kissed her two hands suddenly, and made her a little speech he had learned by heart; after which he kissed her on the lips as a man should, in the honest noon sunlight.

All this was as it should be.  There were no doubts or disasters anywhere.  Marjorie was an only daughter as he an only son.  Her father, it is true, was but a Derby lawyer, but he and his wife had a good little estate above the Hathersage valley, and a stone house in it.  As for religion, that was all well too.  Master Manners was as good a Catholic as Master Audrey himself; and the families met at mass perhaps as much as four or five times in the year, either at Padley, where Sir Thomas’ chapel still had priests coming and going; sometimes at Dethick in the Babingtons’ barn; sometimes as far north as Harewood.

And now a man’s trouble was come upon the boy.  The cause of it was as follows.

Robin Audrey was no more religious than a boy of seventeen should be.  Yet he had had as few doubts about the matter as if he had been a monk.  His mother had taught him well, up to the time of her death ten years ago; and he had learned from her, as well as from his father when that professor spoke of it at all, that there were two kinds of religion in the world, the true and the false—­that is to say, the Catholic religion and the other one.  Certainly there were shades of differences in the other one; the Turk did not believe precisely as the ancient Roman, nor yet as the modern Protestant—­yet these distinctions were subtle and negligible; they were all swallowed up in an unity of falsehood.  Next he had learned that the Catholic religion was at present blown upon by many persons in high position; that pains and penalties lay upon all who adhered to it.  Sir Thomas FitzHerbert, for instance, lay now in the Fleet in London on that very account.  His own father, too, three or four times in the year, was under necessity of paying over heavy sums for the privilege of not attending Protestant worship; and, indeed, had been forced last year to sell a piece of land over on Lees Moor for this very purpose.  Priests came and went at their peril....  He himself had fought two or three battles over the affair in St. Peter’s churchyard, until he had learned to hold his tongue.  But all this was just part of the game.  It seemed to him as inevitable and eternal as the changes of the weather.  Matstead Church, he knew, had once been Catholic; but how long ago he did not care to inquire.  He only knew that for awhile there had been some doubt on the matter;