But they had more time for deliberation given them than they would willingly have taken.  Mr. Herbert had caught cold while reading the funeral service, and was compelled to delay his return.  The cold settled into a sort of low fever, and for many weeks he lay helpless.  During this time the sudden affair at Brentford took place, after which the king, having lost by it far more than he had gained, withdrew to Oxford, anxious to re-open the treaty which the battle had closed.

The country was now in a sad state.  Whichever party was uppermost in any district, sought to ruin all of the opposite faction.  Robbery and plunder became common, and that not only on the track of armies or the route of smaller bodies of soldiers, for bands of mere marauders, taking up the cry of the faction that happened in any neighbourhood to have the ascendancy, plundered houses, robbed travellers, and were guilty of all sorts of violence.  Hence it had become as perilous to stay at home in an unfortified house as to travel; and many were the terrors which during the winter tried the courage of the girl, and checked the recovery of the old man.  At length one morning, after a midnight alarm, Mr. Herbert thus addressed Dorothy, as she waited upon him with his breakfast: 

’It fears me much, my dear Dorothy, that the time will be long ere any but fortified places will be safe abodes.  It is a question in my mind whether it would not be better to seek refuge for you—.  But stay; let me suggest my proposal, rather than startle you with it in sudden form complete.  You are related to the Somersets, are you not?’

‘Yes—­distantly.’

‘Is the relationship recognized by them?’

’I cannot tell, sir.  I do not even distinctly know what the relationship is.  And assuredly, sir, you mean not to propose that I should seek safety from bodily peril with a household which is, to say the least, so unfriendly to the doctrines you and my blessed mother have always taught me!  You cannot, or indeed, must you not have forgotten that they are papists?’

Dorothy had been educated in such a fear of the catholics, and such a profound disapproval of those of their doctrines rejected by the reformers of the church of England, as was only surpassed in intensity by her absolute abhorrence of the assumptions and negations of the puritans.  These indeed roused in her a certain sense of disgust which she had never felt in respect of what were considered by her teachers the most erroneous doctrines of the catholics.  But Mr. Herbert, although his prejudices were nearly as strong, and his opinions, if not more indigenous at least far better acclimatised than hers, had yet reaped this advantage of a longer life, that he was better able to atone his dislike of certain opinions with personal regard for those who held them, and therefore did not, like Dorothy, recoil from the idea of obligation to one of a different creed—­provided always that creed was catholicism and not puritanism.  For to the church of England, the catholics, in the presence of her more rampant foes, appeared harmless enough now.