“I have led but a hermit’s life, as I have told you.  I have been bred up in the faith of my forefathers, and that faith I believe.  What perplexes me is that those who hold the Established or Reformed faith, as men term it, have the same creeds, the same doctrines as we ourselves.  I have from time to time conformed to the law, and gone to the services, and I have not heard aught spoken within their walls that our good priest in old days used not to tell me was sound doctrine.  There be things he taught me that these men say naught about; but no man may in one discourse touch upon every point of doctrine.  I freely own that I have been sorely perplexed to know whence comes all this strife, all these heart burnings.”

“Thou wilt know and understand full soon, when once thou hast seen the life of the great city and the strife of faction there,” answered his companion, lapsing into the familiar “thou” as he spoke with increased earnestness.  “In thy hermit’s life thou hast had no knowledge of the robbery, the desecration, the pollution which our Holy Mother Church has undergone from these pestilent heretics, who have thought to denude her of her beauty and her glory, whilst striving to retain such things as jump with their crabbed humours, and may be pared down to please their poisoned and vicious minds.  Ah! it makes the blood boil in the veins of the true sons of the Church, as thou wilt find, my youthful friend, when thou gettest amongst them.  But it will not always last.  The day of reckoning will come—­nay, is already coming when men shall find that the Blessed and Holy Church may not be defiled and downtrodden with impunity for ever.  Ah yes! the day will come—­it is even at the door—­when God shall arise and his enemies be scattered.  Scattered—­scattered! verily that is the word.  And the sons of the true faith throughout the length and breadth of the land shall arise and rejoice, and the heretics shall stand amazed and confounded!”

As he spoke these words his figure seemed to expand, and he raised his right hand to heaven with a peculiar gesture of mingled menace and appeal.  Cuthbert was silent and amazed.  He did not understand in the least the tenor of these wild words, but he was awed and impressed, and felt at once that the strife and stress of the great world into which he was faring was something very different from anything he had conceived of before.

By this time the travellers had reached the dreary waste called by the inhabitants Hammerton Heath.  At some seasons of the year it was golden with gorse or purple with ling, but in this drear winter season it was bare and colourless, and utterly desolate.  The outline of dark forests could be seen all around on the horizon; but the road led over the exposed ground, where not a tree broke the monotony of the way.  Cuthbert was glad enough to have a companion to ride by his side over the lonely waste, which looked its loneliest in the cold radiance of the moon.