“Mr. John looked well, sir,” pursued Dick, and proceeded to speak at length of the FitzHerbert troubles, and the iniquities of the Queen’s Grace.  He was such a man as was to be found throughout all England everywhere at this time—­a man whose religion was a part of his politics, and none the less genuine for that.  He was a shrewd man in his way, with the simplicity which belongs to such shrewdness; he disliked the new ways which he experienced chiefly in the towns, and put them down, not wholly without justice, to the change of which religion formed an integral part; he hated the beggars and would gladly have gone to see one flogged; and he disliked the ministers and their sermons and their “prophesyings” with all the healthy ardour of prejudice.  Once in the year did Dick approach the sacraments, and a great business he made of it, being unusually morose before them and almost indecently boisterous after them.  He was feudal to the very heart of him; and it was his feudality that made him faithful to his religion as well as to his masters, for either of which he would resolutely have died.  And what in the world he would do when he discovered, at Easter, that the objects of his fidelity were to take opposite courses, Robin could not conceive.

As they rode in at last, Robin, who had fallen silent again after Dick’s last piece of respectful vehemence, suddenly beat his own leg with his whip and uttered an inaudible word.  It seemed to Dick that the young master had perceived clearly that which plainly had been worrying him all the way home, and that he did not like it.

CHAPTER V

I

Mr. Manners sat in his parlour ten days after the beginning of Lent, full of his Sunday dinner and of perplexing thoughts all at once.  He had eaten well and heartily after his week of spare diet, and then, while in high humour with all the world, first his wife and then his daughter had laid before him such revelations that all the pleasure of digestion was gone.  It was but three minutes ago that Marjorie had fled from him in a torrent of tears, for which he could not see himself responsible, since he had done nothing but make the exclamations and comments that should be expected of a father in such a case.

The following were the points for his reflection—­to begin with those that touched him less closely.

First that his friend Mr. Audrey, whom he had always looked upon with reverence and a kind of terror because of his hotness in matters of politics and religion, had capitulated to the enemy and was to go to church at Easter.  Mr. Manners himself had something of timidity in his nature:  he was conservative certainly, and practised, when he could without bringing himself into open trouble, the old religion in which he had been brought up.  He, like the younger generation, had been educated at Derby Grammar School, and in