Yet all this while I made no progress with her or even with myself; for every time that I was alone with her, or when her father was asleep in his chair, a remembrance of what he had said came over me with a kind of sickness, and I could not say one word that might seem to set me on his side against her; and so I was torn two ways, and the very thing by which he had hoped to encourage me, (or rather to help himself) had the contrary effect, and silenced me when I might have spoken.

For I understood very well by now what was in his mind.  He saw no prospect of marrying Dolly to a Protestant—­or I take it, if I know the man, he would have leapt at it; neither was there any hope of marrying her to a Catholic; and as for his talk about my Lady Arlington I did not believe one word of it.  Therefore, since I was at hand, and would be a wealthy man some day, and indeed even now did very well on my French rentes, he had set his heart on this.  It was not wholly evil; yet the cold-bloodedness of it affected me like a stink....

* * * * *

The matter ended, for the time, on the evening of the thirteenth of August, in the following manner, when my adventures, of which my life, ever since my audience with our Most Holy Lord the Pope, had been but a prelude, properly began—­those adventures for whose sake I have begun this transcript from my diary, and this adventure was pre-shadowed, as I think now, by one or two curious happenings.

On the morning of the thirteenth of August, two days before the Feast of the Assumption (on which we had intended to hear mass again at Standon) my Cousin Dorothy came down a little late, and found us already over our oatbread and small beer which we were accustomed to take upon rising—­and which was called our “morning.”

“I slept very ill,” she said; and no more then.

Afterwards, however, as I was lighting my pipe in the little court at the back of the house, she came out and beckoned me in; and I saw that something was amiss.  I went after her into the little hung parlour and we sat down.

“I slept very ill, cousin,” she said again; and I observed again that her eyes looked hollow.  “And I dare not tell my father my fancies,” she said, “for he is terrified at such things; and has forbade the servants to speak of such things.”

“The tall old woman, then?” I said; for I had not forgotten what she had told me before.

“Yes,” she said, smiling a little painfully—­“and yet I was not at all afraid when she came; or when I thought that she did.”

“Tell me the whole tale,” I said.