Intercourse with his kinsfolk had given him his first real insight into the burning questions of the hour, and his attendance from time to time at the parish church had caused him fresh access of wonder at what his father could object to in the doctrines there set forth.  They might not embody everything a popish priest would bid him believe, but at least they appeared to the boy to contain all the integral truths of Christianity.  He began dimly to understand that the Papists were not half so much concerned in the matter of cardinal doctrines of the faith as in asserting and upholding the temporal as well as the spiritual power of the Pope; and that this should be made the matter of the chiefest moment filled the boy’s soul with a loathing and disgust which were strong enough to make him half a Protestant at once.

Sir Richard had seen almost as much, and was greatly interested in the lad; but it was difficult to know how to help him in days when parental authority was so absolute and so rigidly exercised.

“We must do what we can,” said Sir Richard, waking from his reverie and shaking his head.  “But we must have patience too; and it will not be well for the boy to irritate his father too greatly.  Tomorrow I will go to the Gate House and see my uncle, and speak for the boy.  He ought to have the liberty of the law, and the law bids all men attend the services of the Established Church.  But it is ill work reasoning with a Papist of his type; and short of reporting the case to the authorities, meaning more persecution for my unlucky kinsman, I know not what may be done.”

“We must strive so to win upon him by gentle means that he permits his children free intercourse with ours,” said gentle Lady Frances from her seat by the glowing hearth.  “It seems to me that that is all we may hope to achieve in the present.  Perchance as days and weeks pass by we may find a way to that hard and flinty heart.”

“And whilst we wait it may well be that Cuthbert will be goaded to desperation, or be done to death by his remorseless sire,” answered impetuous Kate, who loved not counsels of prudence.  “Methinks that waiting is an ill game.  I would never wait were I a man.  I would always aet—­ay, even in the teeth of deadly peril.  Sure the greatest deeds have been achieved by men of action, not by men of counsel and prudence.”

Sir Richard smiled, as he stroked her hair, and told her she should have lived a hundred or so years back, when it was the fashion to do and dare regardless of consequences.  And gradually the talk drifted away from the inmates of the old Gate House, though Philip was quite resolved to pay an early visit there on the morrow, and learn how it had fared with his cousin.

Supper followed in due course, and was a somewhat lengthy meal.  Then the ladies retired to the stately apartment they had been in before, and the mother read a homily to her daughters, which was listened to with dutiful attention.  But Kate’s bright eyes were often bent upon the casement of one window, the curtain of which she had drawn back with her own hand before sitting down; and as the moon rose brighter and brighter in the sky and bathed the world without in its clear white beams, she seemed to grow a little restless, and tapped the floor with the point of her dainty shoe.