As a young man he had watched heretics burning in Smithfield with a
fierce joy and delight; and when with the accession of Elizabeth
the tide had turned, he had submitted without a murmur to the fines
which had ruined him and driven him, a poverty-stricken dependent,
to the old Gate House. He would have died a martyr with the grim
constancy that he had seen in others, and never lamented what he
suffered for conscience' sake. But he had grown to be a thoroughly
soured and embittered man, and had spent the past twenty or more
years of his life in a ceaseless savage brooding which had made his
abode anything but a happy place for his two children, the
offspring of a late and rather peculiar marriage with a woman by
birth considerably his inferior.

The firmness without the bitterness of his father's face was
reflected in that of the son as Cuthbert fearlessly finished his
speech.

"I am a true son of the Church. I am no outcast--no heretic. But I
will not suffer my soul to be starved. It is the law of this land
that whatever creed men hold in their hearts--whether the tenets of
Rome or those of the Puritans of Scotland--that they shall
outwardly conform themselves to the forms prescribed by the
Establishment, and shall attend the churches of the land; and you
know as well as I do that there be many priests of our faith who
bid their flocks obey this law, and submit themselves to the powers
that be. And yet even with all this I would have restrained myself
from such attendance, knowing that it is an abhorrence unto you,
had there been any other way open to me of hearing the Word of God
or receiving the Blessed Sacrament. But since King James has come
to the throne, the penal laws have been more stringently enforced
against our priests than in the latter days of the Queen. What has
been the result for us? Verily that the priest who did from time to
time minister to us is fled. We are left without help, without
guidance, without teaching, and this when the clouds of peril and
trouble are like to darken more and more about our path."

"And what of that, rash boy? Would you think to lessen the peril by
tampering with the things of the Evil One; by casting aside those
rules and doctrines in which you both have been reared, and
consorting with the subverters of the true faith?"

"But I cannot see that they are subverters of the faith," answered
the youth hotly. "That is where the kernel of the matter lies. I
have heard th