said the former. "Dear heart! but you
look something troubled belike. Is any sick with you?"

Cicely and Agnes were quite aware that their religious sentiments were
alike. It is in the cloudy and dark day that those who fear the Lord
speak often one to another.

"Heavy news, my maid!" said Cicely in a low voice, and shaking her head.
"Yesternight sixty folk were arrest in London for reading of Lutheran
books."

"Poor folk, trow?"

"All manner, as I do hear."

Neither high nor low, in those days, were safe, if suspicion of heresy
were once roused against them. The higher class were the more likely to
be detected; yet there was a little more hesitation in bringing them to
the stake. But it was easy to see, then as now, that as a rule it was
the poor of this world whom God had chosen to be rich in faith. For
every rich man or titled lady who incurred bodily danger through
faithfulness to the truth, there were at least fifty of those whom the
world regards as "nobody."

There was a strange mixture of comedy and tragedy in the events of those
days. The miracle-play alternated with the pillory, and the sight-seers
went from the burning of a heretic in the morning to see the new
athletic games, introduced by the Spaniards, in the afternoon in Palace
Yard. A grand tournament at Court preceded, and a bear-baiting
followed, the humiliating spectacle of the Parliament of England
kneeling at the feet of Cardinal Pole, and abjectly craving absolution
from Rome. One man--Sir Ralph Bagenall--stood out, and stood up, when
all his co-senators were thus prostrate in the dust. He was religiously
a Gallio, not a Gospeller; but he was politically a sturdy Englishman,
and no coward. Strange to say, no harm came to him. Nay, is it
strange, when we read, "Them that honour Me, I will honour," and
"Whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel's, the same
shall save it?"

There were no longer any sermons preached at the Cross that a Gospeller
cared to hear. One was forthcoming regularly every Sunday; but the
preachers were Pendleton the renegade, Feckenham the suave, or Gardiner
the man of blood. The uneasy feeling of a section at least of the
populace was shown by frays at Charing Cross, incipient insurrections in
Suffolk, assaults on priests at the altar, and unaccountable
iconoclasms. The image of Becket was twice found broken by mysterious
means; and a cat, tonsured, and arrayed in miniature vestments, was