o which he had no right.
But he reverenced the Episcopate, he wore the prescribed dress, he used
the thick singing-cakes for the Communion, and he longed for the time
when nation and Church should again be one; when the nation should
worship through a Church of her own shaping, and the Church share the
glory and influence of her lusty partner and patron.

But Mrs. Dent had little sympathy with her husband's views; she had
assimilated the fiery doctrines of the Genevan refugees, and to her mind
her husband was balancing himself to the loss of all dignity and
consistency in an untenable position between the Popish priesthood on the
one side and the Gospel ministry on the other. It was an unbearable
thought to her that through her husband's weak disposition and principles
his chief parishioners should continue to live within a stone's throw of
the Rectory in an assured position of honour, and in personal
friendliness to a minister whose ecclesiastical status and claims they
disregarded. The Rector's position then was difficult and trying, no less
in his own house than elsewhere.

The third main family in the village was that of the Norrises, who lived
in the Dower House, that stood in its own grounds and gardens a few
hundred yards to the north-west of the village green. The house had
originally been part of the Hall estate; but it had been sold some fifty
years before. The present owner, Mr. Henry Norris, a widower, lived there
with his two children, Isabel and Anthony, and did his best to bring them
up in his own religious principles. He was a devout and cultivated
Puritan, who had been affected by the New Learning in his youth, and had
conformed joyfully to the religious changes that took place in Edward's
reign. He had suffered both anxiety and hardships in Mary's reign, when
he had travelled abroad in the Protestant countries, and made the
acquaintance of many of the foreign reformers--Beza, Calvin, and even the
great Melancthon himself. It was at this time, too, that he had lost his
wife. It had been a great joy to him to hear of the accession of
Elizabeth, and the re-establishment of a religion that was sincerely his
own; and he had returned immediately to England with his two little
children, and settled down once more at the Dower House. Here his whole
time that he could spare from his children was divided between prayer and
the writing of a book on the Eucharist; and as his children grew up he
more and more reti