But the words of the priest had awakened a new train of thought.  Cuthbert resolved not to delay longer the reclamation of his own property.  He spoke to Cherry that same evening about his lost purse, giving her a brief account of his ride across Hammerton Heath, and she was eager for him to ask his own, lest he should lose it altogether.

“For gay gallants are not always to be trusted, for all that they look so fine and speak so fair,” she said, nodding her pretty curly head, an arch smile in her big gray eyes.  “I have heard my father say so a hundred times.  I would go quickly and claim mine own again.  But tell me the rest of the adventure.  What didst thou, left thus alone upon the lone heath?  I trow it was an unmanly and unmannerly act to leave thee thus.  What befell thee then?”

Cuthbert looked round cautiously; but there was no one listening to the chatter of this pair of idlers in the window.  Mistress Susan’s voice was heard below scolding the serving wench, and Martin Holt was poring over some big ledger whilst Jemima called over the figures of a heap of bills.  Keziah was at her spinning wheel, which hummed merrily in the red firelight; and Cherry was seizing advantage of her aunt’s absence to chatter instead of work.

Cherry had from the first been Cuthbert’s confidante and friend.  It was taken for granted by this time that this should be so.  Nobody was surprised to see them often together, and Cherry had never found the house on the bridge so little dull as when Cuthbert came in night by night to give her the most charming and exciting accounts of his doings and adventures.  Once, too, she had gone with him to see some sights.  They had paraded Paul’s Walk together, and Cuthbert had been half scandalized and wholly astonished to see a fine church desecrated to a mere fashionable promenade and lounging place and mart.  They had watched some gallants at their tennis playing another day, and had even been present at the baiting of a bear, when they had come unawares upon the spectacle in their wanderings.  But Cuthbert’s ire had been excited through his humanity and love for dumb animals, and Cherry had been frightened and sickened by the brutality of the spectacle.  And when Martin Holt had inveighed against the practice with all a Puritan’s vehemence, Cuthbert had cordially agreed, and had thus drawn as it were one step nearer the side of the great coming controversy which his uncle had embraced.

These expeditions together had naturally drawn the cousins into closer bonds of intimacy.  Cherry felt privileged to ask questions of Cuthbert almost at will, and he had no wish to hide anything from her.