h I had not known
already, I felt that evening as I sat at supper, and afterwards, in the
coffee house at 17, Fleet Street (which he recommended to me) that I
knew them in a different manner. For I had spoken with some of the
principal actors, and, above all, with the King himself. My cousin
questioned me delightedly upon my experiences when we were alone with
our pipes at one end of the great room that had been a council-chamber;
and related to me all his own experiences with the King at great
length; and how Charles had made to him some witty remarks which I think
must have lost in the telling, for they were not witty at all when I
heard them. It appeared that my cousin had spoken with the King three or
four times, at City-banquets and such like; and he would know all that
His Majesty had said to me. But much I would not tell him, and some I
could not: I could not that is, even if I would, have conveyed to him
the strange compassion that I felt, and the yet more strange affection,
for this King who might have done so much, and who did so little--except
what he should not; and I would not on any account tell him of what the
King had said as to Rome and his desires and procrastinations. But I
told him how I had met Father Whitbread, and how I was to go and see him
on the morrow.

"Why, I will come with you myself," he said. "I know Mr. Fenwick's
lodgings very well: and we will ride afterwards as far as Waltham Cross,
and lie there; and so to Hare Street for dinner next day."

All the way home again, and when my Cousin Dorothy was gone to bed, and
we sat over a couple of tankards of College Ale, he would talk of
nothing but the Jesuits.

"They are too zealous," he said. "I am as good a Catholic as any man in
England or Rome; but I like not this over-zeal. They are everywhere,
these good fathers; and it will bring trouble on them. They hold their
consults even in London, which I think over-rash; and no man knows what
passes at them. Now I myself--" and so his tongue wagged on, telling of
his own excellence and prudence, and even his own spirituality, while
his eyes watered with the ale that he drank, and his face grew ever more
red. And yet there was no true simplicity in the man; he had that kind
of cunning that is eked out with winks and becks and nods that all the
world could see. He talked of my Cousin Dorothy, too, and her virtues,
and what a great lady she would be some day when these virtues were
known; and he,