And Captain Talbot had a cruel satisfaction in replying, “No, Master Babington; the Tower is not for refractory boys.  You are going to your schoolmaster.”

But where the school was to be Richard kept an absolute secret by special desire, in order that no communication should be kept up through any of the household.  He was to avoid Chatsworth, and to return as soon as possible to endeavour to trace the supposed huckster-woman at Chesterfield.

When once away from home, he ceased to treat young Babington as a criminal, but rode in a friendly manner with him through lanes and over moors, till the young fellow began to thaw towards him, and even went so far as to volunteer one day that he would not have brought Mistress Cicely into the matter if there had been any other sure way of getting the letter delivered in his absence.

“Ah, boy!” returned Richard, “when once we swerve from the open and direct paths, there is no saying into what tangles we may bring ourselves and others.”

Antony winced a little, and said, “Whoever says I lied, lies in his throat.”

“No one hath said thou wert false in word, but how as to thy deed?”

“Sir,” said Antony, “surely when a high emprise and great right is to be done, there is no need to halt over such petty quibbles.”

“Master Babington, no great right was ever done through a little wrong.  Depend on it, if you cannot aid without a breach of trust, it is the sure sign that it is not the will of God that you should be the one to do it.”

Captain Talbot mused whether he should convince or only weary the lad by an argument he had once heard in a sermon, that the force of Satan’s temptation to our blessed Lord, when showing Him all the kingdoms of the world, must have been the absolute and immediate vanishing of all kinds of evil, by a voluntary abdication on the part of the Prince of this world, instead not only of the coming anguish of the strife, but of the long, long, often losing, battle which has been waging ever since.  Yet for this great achievement He would not commit the moment’s sin.  He was just about to begin when Antony broke in, “Then, sir, you do deem it a great wrong?”

“That I leave to wiser heads than mine,” returned the sailor.  “My duty is to obey my Lord, his duty is to obey her Grace.  That is all a plain man needs to see.”

“But an if the true Queen be thus mewed up, sir?” asked Antony.  Richard was too wise a man to threaten the suggestion down as rank treason, well knowing that thus he should never root it out.

“Look you here, Antony,” he said; “who ought to reign is a question of birth, such as neither of us can understand nor judge.  But we know thus much, that her Grace, Queen Elizabeth, hath been crowned and anointed and received oaths of fealty as her due, and that is quite enough for any honest man.”

“Even when she keeps in durance the Queen, who came as her guest in dire distress?”