As a young man he had watched heretics burning in Smithfield with a fierce joy and delight; and when with the accession of Elizabeth the tide had turned, he had submitted without a murmur to the fines which had ruined him and driven him, a poverty-stricken dependent, to the old Gate House.  He would have died a martyr with the grim constancy that he had seen in others, and never lamented what he suffered for conscience’ sake.  But he had grown to be a thoroughly soured and embittered man, and had spent the past twenty or more years of his life in a ceaseless savage brooding which had made his abode anything but a happy place for his two children, the offspring of a late and rather peculiar marriage with a woman by birth considerably his inferior.

The firmness without the bitterness of his father’s face was reflected in that of the son as Cuthbert fearlessly finished his speech.

“I am a true son of the Church.  I am no outcast—­no heretic.  But I will not suffer my soul to be starved.  It is the law of this land that whatever creed men hold in their hearts—­whether the tenets of Rome or those of the Puritans of Scotland—­that they shall outwardly conform themselves to the forms prescribed by the Establishment, and shall attend the churches of the land; and you know as well as I do that there be many priests of our faith who bid their flocks obey this law, and submit themselves to the powers that be.  And yet even with all this I would have restrained myself from such attendance, knowing that it is an abhorrence unto you, had there been any other way open to me of hearing the Word of God or receiving the Blessed Sacrament.  But since King James has come to the throne, the penal laws have been more stringently enforced against our priests than in the latter days of the Queen.  What has been the result for us?  Verily that the priest who did from time to time minister to us is fled.  We are left without help, without guidance, without teaching, and this when the clouds of peril and trouble are like to darken more and more about our path.”

“And what of that, rash boy?  Would you think to lessen the peril by tampering with the things of the Evil One; by casting aside those rules and doctrines in which you both have been reared, and consorting with the subverters of the true faith?”

“But I cannot see that they are subverters of the faith,” answered the youth hotly.  “That is where the kernel of the matter lies.  I have heard their preachings.  I have talked with my cousins at the Chase, who know what their doctrine is.”

But at these words the old man fairly gnashed his teeth in fury; he made a rush at his son and took him by the collar of his doublet, shaking him in a frenzy of rage.