o shift the
conversation round to Isabel, and inquire when she was coming home.
Anthony was rather bored at this turn of the talk; but thought she would
be back by Christmas at the latest; and said that she was at
Northampton--and had Hubert ever seen such courage as Eliza's? But Hubert
would not be put off; but led the talk back again to the girl; and at
last told Anthony under promise of secrecy that he was fond of Isabel,
and wished to make her his wife;--and oh! did Anthony think she cared
really for him. Anthony stared and wondered and had no opinion at all on
the subject; but presently fell in love with the idea that Hubert should
be his brother-in-law and go hawking with him every day; and he added a
private romance of his own in which he and Mary Corbet should be at the
Dower House, with Hubert and Isabel at the Hall; while the elders, his
own father, Sir Nicholas, Mr. James, Lady Maxwell, and Mistress Torridon
had all taken up submissive and complacent attitudes in the middle
distance.

He was so pensive that evening that his father asked him at supper
whether he had not had a good day; which diverted his thoughts from
Mistress Corbet, and led him away from sentiment on a stream of his own
talk with long backwaters of description of this and that stoop, and of
exactly the points in which he thought the Maxwells' falconer had failed
in the training of Hubert's Jane.

Hubert found a long letter waiting from his father which Lady Maxwell
gave him to read, with messages to himself in it about the estate, which
brought him down again from the treading of rosy cloud-castles with a
phantom Isabel whither his hawks and the shouting wind and the happy day
had wafted him, down to questions of barns and farm-servants and the
sober realities of harvest.

CHAPTER XI

MASTER CALVIN

Isabel reached Northampton a day or two before Hubert came back to Great
Keynes. She travelled down with two combined parties going to Leicester
and Nottingham, sleeping at Leighton Buzzard on the way; and on the
evening of the second day reached the house of her father's friend Dr.
Carrington, that stood in the Market Square.

Her father's intention in sending her to this particular town and
household was to show her how Puritanism, when carried to its extreme,
was as orderly and disciplined a system, and was able to control the
lives of its adherents, as well as the Catholi