Chapter 7:  The Life Of A Great City.

And so a new life began for Cuthbert beneath the roof of his uncle.

He found favour in the sight of Martin Holt because of his unpretending ways, his willingness, nay, his eagerness to learn, his ready submission to the authority exercised by the master of the house upon all beneath his roof, and the absence of anything like presumption or superciliousness on his nephew’s part on the score of his patrician birth on his father’s side.  Trevlyn though he was, the lad conformed to all the ways and usages of the humbler Holts; and even Mistress Susan soon ceased to look sourly at him, for she found him as amenable to her authority as to that of Martin, and handy and helpful in a thousand little nameless ways.

He was immensely interested in everything about him.  He would as willingly sit and baste a capon on the spit as ramble abroad in the streets, if she would but answer his host of inquiries about London, its ways and its sights.  Mistress Susan was not above being open to the insidious flattery of being questioned and listened to; and to find herself regarded as an oracle of wisdom and a mine of information could not but be soothing to her vanity, little as she knew that she possessed her share of that common feminine failing.

Then Cuthbert was a warm appreciator of her culinary talents.  The poor boy, who had lived at the Gate House on the scantiest of commons, and had been kept to oaten bread and water sometimes for a week together for a trifling offence, felt indeed that he had come to a land of plenty when he sat down day after day to his uncle’s well-spread table, and was urged to partake of all manner of dishes, the very name of which was unknown to him.  His keen relish of her dainties, combined with what seemed to her a very modest consumption of them, pleased Mistress Susan not a little; whilst for his own part Cuthbert began to look heartier and stronger than he had ever done before.  The slimness of attenuation was merged in that of wiry strength and muscle.  His dark eyes no longer looked out from hollow caverns, and the colour which gradually stole into his brown cheek bespoke increase of health and well being.

Martin and Susan looked on well pleased by the change.  They liked the lad, and found his Popery of such a mild kind that they felt no misgiving as to its influence upon the girls.  Cuthbert was as willing to go to a privately conducted Puritan service as to mass, and liked the appointed service of the Establishment rather better than either.  Martin did not hinder his attending the parish church, though he but rarely put in an appearance himself.  He was not one of the bitter opponents of the Establishment, but he was a bitter opponent of persecution for conscience’ sake, and he was naturally embittered by the new rigour with which the old laws of conformity were enforced.  However, he was true to his principles in that he