my
condition of life never attain unto? Did I ever anger you by
disobedience or revolt?"

"What of that, since you are doing so now?" questioned Nicholas in
a quieter tone, yet one full of suspicion and resentment. "What use
to talk of what is past and gone? Thou knowest well of late years
how thou hast been hankering after every vile and villainous heresy
that has come in thy way. It is thy mother's blood within thee
belike. I did grievous wrong ever to wed with one reared a
Protestant, however she might abjure the errors in which she was
brought up. False son of a false mother--"

"Hold, sir! You shall not miscall my mother! No son will stand by
and hear that!"

"I will say what I will in mine own house, thou evil, malapert
boy!" roared the old man. "I tell thee that thy mother was a false
woman, that she deceived me bitterly. After solemnly abjuring the
errors in which she had been reared, and being received into the
true fold, she, as years went by, lapsed more and more into her
foul heretical ways of thought and speech; and though she went to
her last reckoning (unshriven and unassoiled, for she would have no
priest at her dying bed) before ye twain were old enough to have
been corrupted by her precept and example, ye must have sucked in
heresy with your mother's milk, else how could son of mine act in
the vile fashion that thou art acting?"

"I am acting in no vile fashion. I am no heretic. I am a true son
of the true Church."

Cuthbert spoke with a forced calmness which gave his words weight,
and for a moment even the angry man paused to listen to them, eying
the youth keenly all the while, as though measuring his own
strength against him. Physically he was far more than a match for
the slightly-built stripling of one-and-twenty, being a man of
great height and muscular power--power that had in no wise
diminished with advancing years, though time had turned his black
locks to iron gray, and seamed his face with a multitude of
wrinkles. Pride, passion, gloomy defiance, and bitter hatred of his
kind seemed written on that face, which in its youth must have been
handsome enough. Nicholas Trevlyn was a disappointed, embittered
man, who added to all other faults of temperament that of a
hopeless bigot of the worst kind. He was the sort of man of whom
Inquisitors must surely have been made--without pity, without
remorse, without any kind of natural feeling when once their
religious convictions were at stake.