een, was
not reassuring.

In spite of the Six Articles of the previous year by which all vows of
chastity were declared binding before God, there was no hint of making
it possible for the thousands of Religious in England still compelled by
them to return to the Life in which such vows were tolerable. The
Religious were indeed dispensed from obedience and poverty by the civil
authority; it was possible for them to buy, inherit, and occupy
property; but a recognition of their corporate life was as far as ever
away. It was becoming plainer every day that those who wished to pursue
their vocation must do so in voluntary exile; and letters were already
being exchanged between the brother and sister at home and the
representatives of their respective communities on the Continent.

Then suddenly on the eleventh of June there arrived the news of
Cromwell's fall and of all that it involved to Ralph.

They were at dinner when it came.

There was a door suddenly thrust open at the lower end of the hall; and
a courier, white with dust and stiff with riding, limped up the matting
and delivered Beatrice's letter. It was very short.

"Come," she had written. "My Lord of Essex is arrested. He is in the
Tower. Mr. Ralph, too, is there for refusing to inform against him. He
has behaved gallantly."

There followed a line from Mistress Jane Atherton, her aunt, offering
rooms in her own house.

* * * * *

A wild confusion fell upon the household. Men ran to and fro, women
whispered and sobbed in corners under shadow of the King's displeasure
that lay on the house, the road between the terrace and the stable
buzzed with messengers, ordering and counter-ordering, for it was not
certain at first that Margaret would not go. A mounted groom dashed up
for instructions and was met by Sir James in his riding-cloak on the
terrace who bade him ride to Great Keynes with the news, and entreat Sir
Nicholas Maxwell to come up to London and his wife to Overfield; there
was not time to write. Sir James's own room was in confusion; his
clothes lay tumbled on the ground and a distraught servant tossed them
this way and that; Chris was changing his habit upstairs, for it would
mean disaster to go to town as a monk. Margaret was on her knees in
chapel, silent and self-controlled, but staring piteously at the
compassionate figure of the great Mother who looked down on her with Her
Son in Her arms. The huge dog under the