not so much affected by the gallop of the
couriers, or the slow creeping rumours from the Continent, as villages
that lay on lines of frequent communication. So the simple life went on,
and Isabel went about her business in Mrs. Carroll's still-room, and
Anthony rode out with the harriers, and Sir Nicholas told his beads in
his room--all with nearly as much serenity as if Scotland were fairyland
and Spain a dream.

CHAPTER II

THE HALL AND THE HOUSE

Anthony Norris, who was now about fourteen, went up to King's College,
Cambridge, in October. He was closeted long with his father the night
before he left, and received from him much sound religious advice and
exhortation; and in the morning, after an almost broken-hearted good-bye
from Isabel, he rode out with his servant following on another horse and
leading a packhorse on the saddle of which the falcons swayed and
staggered, and up the curving drive that led round into the village
green. He was a good-hearted and wholesome-minded boy, and left a real
ache behind him in the Dower House.

Isabel indeed ran up to his room, after she had seen his feathered cap
disappear at a trot through the gate, leaving her father in the hall; and
after shutting and latching the door, threw herself on his bed, and
sobbed her heart out. They had never been long separated before. For the
last three years he had gone over to the Rectory morning by morning to be
instructed by Mr. Dent; but now, although he would never make a great
scholar, his father thought it well to send him up to Cambridge for two
or three years, that he might learn to find his own level in the world.

Anthony himself was eager to go. If the truth must be told, he fretted a
little against the restraints of even such a moderate Puritan household
as that of his father's. It was a considerable weariness to Anthony to
kneel in the hall on a fresh morning while his father read, even though
with fervour and sincerity, long extracts from "Christian Prayers and
Holy Meditations," collected by the Reverend Henry Bull, when the real
world, as Anthony knew it, laughed and rippled and twinkled outside in
the humming summer air of the lawn and orchard; or to have to listen to
godly discourses, however edifying to elder persons, just at the time
when the ghost-moth was beginning to glimmer in the dusk, and the heavy
trout to suck down his supper in the glooming pool in