“You darling!” she said again.

* * * * *

These two, as will have been seen, were as simple as children, and as serious.  Children are not gay and light-hearted, except now and then (just as men and women are not serious except now and then).  They are grave and considering:  all that they lack is experience.  These two, then, were real children; they were grave and serious because a great thing had disclosed itself to them in which two or three large principles were present, and no more.  There was that love of one another, whose consummation seemed imperilled, for how could these two ever wed if Robin were to quarrel with his father?  There was the Religion which was in their bones and blood—­the Religion for which already they had suffered and their fathers before them.  There was the honour and loyalty which this new and more personal suffering demanded now louder than ever; and in Marjorie at least, as will be seen more plainly later, there was a strong love of Jesus Christ and His Mother, whom she knew, from her hidden crucifix and her beads, and her Jesus Psalter—­which she used every day—­as well as in her own soul—­to be wandering together once more among the hills of Derbyshire, sheltering, at peril of Their lives, in stables and barns and little secret chambers, because there was no room for Them in Their own places.  It was this last consideration, as Robin had begun to guess, that stood strongest in the girl; it was this, too, as again he had begun to guess, that made her all that she was to him, that gave her that strange serious air of innocency and sweetness, and drew from him a love that was nine-tenths reverence and adoration. (He always kissed her hands first, it will be remembered, before her lips.)

So then they sat and considered and talked.  They did not speak much of her Grace, nor of her Grace’s religion, nor of her counsellors and affairs of state:  these things were but toys and vanities compared with matters of love and faith; neither did they speak much of the Commissioners that had been to Derbyshire once and would come again, or of the alarms and the dangers and the priest hunters, since those things did not at present touch them very closely.  It was rather of Robin’s father, and whether and when the maid should tell her parents, and how this new trouble would conflict with their love.  They spoke, that is to say, of their own business and of God’s; and of nothing else.  The frosty sunshine crept down the painted wainscot and lay at last at their feet, reddening to rosiness....

III