‘Stopped for the night, Caspar?’ said his lordship.

‘Yes, my lord; the well is nearly out.’

‘Let it sleep,’ returned his master; ’like a man’s heart it will fill in the night.  Thank God for the night and darkness and sleep, in which good things draw nigh like God’s thieves, and steal themselves in—­water into wells, and peace and hope and courage into the minds of men.  Is it not so, my cousin?’

Dorothy did not answer in words, but she looked up in his face with a reverence in her eyes that showed she understood him.  And this was one of the idolatrous catholics!  It was neither the first nor the last of many lessons she had to receive, in order to learn that a man may be right although the creed for which he is and ought to be ready to die, may contain much that is wrong.  Alas! that so few, even of such men, ever reflect, that it is the element common to all the creeds which gives its central value to each.

‘I cannot show you the working of the engine to-night,’ said lord Herbert.  ‘Caspar has decreed otherwise.’

‘I can soon set her agoing again, my lord,’ said Caspar.

’No, no.  We must to the powder-mill, Caspar.  Mistress Dorothy will come again to-morrow, and you must yourself explain to her the working and management of it, for I shall be away.  And do not fear to trust my cousin, Caspar, although she be a soft-handed lady.  Let her have the brute’s halter in her own hold.’

Filled with gratitude for the trust he reposed in her, Dorothy took her leave, and the two workmen immediately abandoned their shop for the night, leaving the door wide open behind them to let out the vapours of the fire-engine, in the confidence that no unlicensed foot would dare to cross the threshold, and betook themselves to the powder-mill, where they continued at work the greater part of the night.

His lordship was unfavourable to the storing of powder because of the danger, seeing they could, on his calculation, from the materials lying ready for mixing, in one week prepare enough to keep all the ordnance on the castle walls busy for two.  But indeed he had not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a city from a quarter of a mile’s distance without any noise audible to those within.  It was this device he was brooding over when Dorothy came upon him by the arblast.  Nor did the conviction arise from any prejudice against fire-arms, for he had, among many other wonderful things of the sort, in cannons, sakers, harquebusses, muskets, musquetoons, and all kinds, invented a pistol to discharge a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as new priming being once requisite, or the possessor having to change it out of one hand into the other, or stop his horse.