the hair prickled
on his head.

How deathly still it is, and how cold! Ah! was that a rustle outside; a
tap?... In God's name, who can that be?...

And then Hubert licked his dry lips and brought them together and smiled
at Grace, who had come down, opening the doors as she came, to see why he
had not come to bed.

Bah! what a superstitious fool he was, after all!

CHAPTER VI

A DEPARTURE

The months went by happily at Stanfield; and, however ill went the
fortunes of the Church elsewhere, here at least were peace and
prosperity. Most discouraging news indeed did reach them from time to
time. The severe penalties now enacted against the practice of the
Catholic Religion were being enforced with great vigour, and the weak
members of the body began to fail. Two priests had apostatised at
Chichester earlier in the year, one of them actually at the scaffold on
Broyle Heath; and then in December there were two more recantations at
Paul's Cross. Those Catholics too who threw up the Faith generally became
the most aggressive among the persecutors, to testify to their own
consciences, as well to the Protestants, of the sincerity of their
conversion.

But in Stanfield the Church flourished, and Anthony had the great
happiness of receiving his first convert in the person of Mr. Rowe, the
young owner of a house called East Maskells, separated from Stanfield
Place by a field-path of under a mile in length, though the road round
was over two; and the comings and goings were frequent now between the
two houses. Mr. Rowe was at present unmarried, and had his aunt to keep
house for him, a tolerant old maiden lady who had conformed placidly to
the Reformed Religion thirty years before, and was now grown content with
it. Several "schismatics" too--as those Catholics were called who
attended their parish church--had waxed bolder, and given up their
conformity to the Establishment; so it was a happy and courageous flock
that gathered Sunday by Sunday at Stanfield Place.

* * * *

Just before Christmas, Anthony received a long and affectionate letter
from James Maxwell, who was still at Douai.

"The Rector will still have me here," he wrote, "and shows me to the
young men as if I were a kind of warrior; which is bad for pride; but
then he humbles me again by telling me I am of more use here as an
example, than I should