To their convictions, she was the only legitimate sovereign in the island, a confessor for their beloved Church, a captive princess and beauty driven from her throne, and kept in durance by a usurper.  Thus every generous feeling was enlisted in her cause, with nothing to counterbalance them save the English hatred of the Spaniard, with whom her cause was inextricably linked; a dread of what might be inflicted on the country in the triumph of her party; and in some, a strange inconsistent personal loyalty to Elizabeth; but all these they were instructed to believe mere temptations and delusions that ought to be brushed aside as cobwebs.

Antony’s Puritan tutor at Cambridge had, as Richard Talbot had foreboded, done little but add to his detestation of the Reformation, and he had since fallen in with several of the seminary priests who were circulating in England.  Some were devoted and pious men, who at the utmost risk went from house to house to confirm the faith and constancy of the old families of their own communion.  The saintly martyr spirit of one of these, whom Antony met in the house of a kinsman of his mother, had so wrought on him as to bring him heart and soul back to his mother’s profession, in which he had been secretly nurtured in early childhood, and which had received additional confirmation at Sheffield, where Queen Mary and her ladies had always shown that they regarded him as one of themselves, sure to return to them when he was his own master.  It was not, however, of this that he spoke to Cis, but whatever she ventured to tell him of the Queen was listened to with delight as an extreme favour, which set her tongue off with all the eager pleasure of a girl, telling what she alone can tell.

All through the banquet they talked, for Babington had much to ask of all the members of the household whom he had known.  And after the feast was over and the hall was cleared for dancing, Antony was still, by etiquette, her partner for the evening.  The young bride and bridegroom had first to perform a stately pavise before the whole assembly in the centre of the floor, in which, poor young things, they acquitted themselves much as if they were in the dancing-master’s hands.  Then her father led out his mother, and vice verse.  The bridegroom had no grandparents, but the stately Earl handed forth his little active wiry Countess, bowing over her with a grand stiff devotion as genuine and earnest as at their wedding twenty years previously, for the reconciliation had been complete, and had restored all her ascendency over him.  Theirs, as Mistress Susan exultingly agreed with a Hardwicke kinsman not seen for many years, was the grandest and most featly of all the performances.  All the time each pair were performing, the others were awaiting their turn, the ladies in rows on benches or settles, the gentlemen sometimes standing before them, sometimes sitting on cushions or steps at their feet, sometimes handing them comfits of sugar or dried fruits.