with their faces turned to
me; or, when it grew late with the candlelight upon them and their
dresses or sometimes when the evening was fair and warm I would sit out
upon the lawn, and they at the window, and listen to the singing coming
out of the candlelight, and see them move against it. My Cousin Dorothy
would make herself fine in the evening--not, I mean, like a Court lady,
for these dresses of hers were put away in lavender--but with a lace
neckerchief on her throat and shoulders, and lace ruffles at her wrists.

Yet all this while I made no progress with her or even with myself; for
every time that I was alone with her, or when her father was asleep in
his chair, a remembrance of what he had said came over me with a kind of
sickness, and I could not say one word that might seem to set me on his
side against her; and so I was torn two ways, and the very thing by
which he had hoped to encourage me, (or rather to help himself) had the
contrary effect, and silenced me when I might have spoken.

For I understood very well by now what was in his mind. He saw no
prospect of marrying Dolly to a Protestant--or I take it, if I know the
man, he would have leapt at it; neither was there any hope of marrying
her to a Catholic; and as for his talk about my Lady Arlington I did not
believe one word of it. Therefore, since I was at hand, and would be a
wealthy man some day, and indeed even now did very well on my French
_rentes_, he had set his heart on this. It was not wholly evil; yet the
cold-bloodedness of it affected me like a stink....

* * * * *

The matter ended, for the time, on the evening of the thirteenth of
August, in the following manner, when my adventures, of which my life,
ever since my audience with our Most Holy Lord the Pope, had been but a
prelude, properly began--those adventures for whose sake I have begun
this transcript from my diary, and this adventure was pre-shadowed, as I
think now, by one or two curious happenings.

On the morning of the thirteenth of August, two days before the Feast of
the Assumption (on which we had intended to hear mass again at Standon)
my Cousin Dorothy came down a little late, and found us already over our
oatbread and small beer which we were accustomed to take upon
rising--and which was called our "morning."

"I slept very ill," she said; and no more then.

Afterwards, however, as I was lighting my pipe in the little court at
the back o