those days, and by no means entirely distasteful to one
of his temperament and training--he had slept in many strange
places, and had known quarters far ruder than the unceiled,
raftered room of the gabled farm.

In time it all came back to him--the attack upon the helpless girl
in the wood, his own successful defence, and the journey to the
farmhouse in the gathering darkness. Paul gave himself a shake to
see how he felt, and decided that although stiff and bruised, and
crippled in the left arm, he might yet make shift to rise and dress
himself. He saw his clothes all laid out in readiness for him, and
it was plain that some good friend had sat up far into the night
brushing and mending them; for they had been in somewhat sorry
plight after his adventure of yesterday, and now they were fresh
and clean and almost smart looking, as they had not been for many a
long day before.

As Paul was slowly dressing, he was suddenly aware of the sound of
a woman's voice speaking or reading--he fancied from its monotonous
cadence that it must be the latter--in some room that could not be
far away from his own chamber. In those days such an accomplishment
as reading was not at all common to the inhabitants of a farm, and
Paul stood still in surprise to listen.

Yes, there was no mistaking it, there was certainly somebody--some
woman--reading aloud in a chamber hard by. Presently the cadence of
the voice changed, and Paul was certain that the reading had
changed to prayer; but not the pattering Paternosters or Ave Marias
with which he was familiar enough. This style of prayer was quite
different from that; and the young man, after listening for a few
moments with bated breath, exclaimed to himself, in accents of
surprise and some dismay:

"Lollards, in good sooth! By the mass, I must have stumbled into a
nest of heresy;" and he crossed himself devoutly, as if to shield
himself from the evil of contamination.

Paul had been born and bred a Papist, as indeed was the case with
most of his countrymen in those days. The House of Lancaster was
deeply attached to the faith as they found it, and Henry the Sixth
had burned many a heretic at Smithfield; for he was at once a saint
and a fanatic--a very common combination then, hard enough as it
seems now to bracket the two qualities together--and led in all
things by his ghostly advisers.

But the leaven of the new doctrines was silently working throughout
the length and breadth of the