“How now?” said Richard, “we are not so near any coast of Turks or Infidels that we should deem her sprung of heathen folk.”

“Assuredly not,” said Cuthbert Langston, whose quick, light-coloured eyes had spied the reliquary in Mistress Susan’s work-basket, “if this belongs to her.  By your leave, kinswoman,” and he lifted it in his hand with evident veneration, and began examining it.

“It is Babylonish gold, an accursed thing!” exclaimed Master Heatherthwayte.  “Beware, Master Talbot, and cast it from thee.”

“Nay,” said Richard,” that shall I not do.  It may lead to the discovery of the child’s kindred.  Why, my master, what harm think you it will do to us in my dame’s casket?  Or what right have we to make away with the little one’s property?”

His common sense was equally far removed from the horror of the one visitor as from the reverence of the other, and so it pleased neither.  Master Langston was the first to speak, observing that the relic made it evident that the child must have been baptized.

“A Popish baptism,” said Master Heatherthwayte, “with chrism and taper and words and gestures to destroy the pure simplicity of the sacrament.”

Controversy here seemed to be setting in, and the infant cause of it here setting up a cry, Susan escaped under pretext of putting Humfrey to bed in the next room, and carried off both the little ones.  The conversation then fell upon the voyage, and the captain described the impregnable aspect of the castle of Dumbarton, which was held for Queen Mary by her faithful partisan, Lord Flemyng.  On this, Cuthbert Langston asked whether he had heard any tidings of the imprisoned Queen, and he answered that it was reported at Leith that she had well-nigh escaped from Lochleven, in the disguise of a lavender or washerwoman.  She was actually in the boat, and about to cross the lake, when a rude oarsman attempted to pull aside her muffler, and the whiteness of the hand she raised in self-protection betrayed her, so that she was carried back.  “If she had reached Dumbarton,” he said, “she might have mocked at the Lords of the Congregation.  Nay, she might have been in that very brig, whose wreck I beheld.”

“And well would it have been for Scotland and England had it been the will of Heaven that so it should fall out,” observed the Puritan.

“Or it may be,” said the merchant, “that the poor lady’s escape was frustrated by Providence, that she might be saved from the rocks of the Spurn.”

“The poor lady, truly!  Say rather the murtheress,” quoth Heatherthwayte.

“Say rather the victim and scapegoat of other men’s plots,” protested Langston.