kiss every footstep she had taken, and almost worshipped him
and John Eyre for contriving this mode of letting them behold the
hitherto unknown object of their veneration.

All that passionate, chivalrous devotion, which in Sidney, Spenser, and
many more attached itself to then-great Gloriana, had in these young
men, all either secretly or openly reconciled to Rome, found its object
in that rival in whom Edmund Spenser only beheld his false Duessa or
snowy Florimel. And, indeed, romance had in her a congenial heroine,
who needed little self-blinding so to appear. Her beauty needed no
illusion to be credited. Even at her age, now over forty, the glimpse
they had had in the fitful torchlight of the cavern had been ravishing,
and had confirmed all they had ever heard of her witching loveliness;
nor did they recollect how that very obscurity might have assisted it.

To their convictions, she was the only legitimate sovereign in the
island, a confessor for their beloved Church, a captive princess and
beauty driven from her throne, and kept in durance by a usurper. Thus
every generous feeling was enlisted in her cause, with nothing to
counterbalance them save the English hatred of the Spaniard, with whom
her cause was inextricably linked; a dread of what might be inflicted
on the country in the triumph of her party; and in some, a strange
inconsistent personal loyalty to Elizabeth; but all these they were
instructed to believe mere temptations and delusions that ought to be
brushed aside as cobwebs.

Antony's Puritan tutor at Cambridge had, as Richard Talbot had
foreboded, done little but add to his detestation of the Reformation,
and he had since fallen in with several of the seminary priests who
were circulating in England. Some were devoted and pious men, who at
the utmost risk went from house to house to confirm the faith and
constancy of the old families of their own communion. The saintly
martyr spirit of one of these, whom Antony met in the house of a
kinsman of his mother, had so wrought on him as to bring him heart and
soul back to his mother's profession, in which he had been secretly
nurtured in early childhood, and which had received additional
confirmation at Sheffield, where Queen Mary and her ladies had always
shown that they regarded him as one of themselves, sure to return to
them when he was his own master. It was not, however, of this that he
spoke to Cis, but whatever she ventured to tell him of th