. Father, don't you think the angels are very quiet folks?
I couldn't think they'd come at me like Aunt Tabby."

"The angels obey the Lord, my Christie, and the Lord is very gentle. He
`knoweth our frame,' and `remembereth that we are but dust.'"

"I don't feel much like dust," said Christie meditatively. "I feel more
like strings that somebody had pulled tight till it hurt. But I do wish
Aunt Tabitha would obey the Lord too, Father. I can't think _she_ knows
our frame, unless hers is vastly unlike mine."

"I rather count it is, Christie," said Roger.

Mr Benden had come out for his airing in an unhappy frame of mind, and
his interview with Tabitha sent him home in a worse. Could he by an
effort of will have obliterated the whole of his recent performances, he
would gladly have done it; but as this was impossible, he refused to
confess himself in the wrong. He was not going to humble himself, he
said gruffly--though there was nobody to hear him--to that spiteful cat
Tabitha. As to Alice, he was at once very angry with her, and very much
put out by her absence. It was all her fault, he said again. Why could
she not behave herself at first, and come to church like a reasonable
woman, and as everybody else did? If she had stood out for a new dress,
or a velvet hood, he could have understood it; but these new-fangled
nonsensical fancies nobody could understand. Who could by any
possibility expect a sensible man to give in to such rubbish?

So Mr Benden reasoned himself into the belief that he was an ill-used
martyr, Alice a most unreasonable woman, and Tabitha a wicked fury.
Having no principles himself, that any one else should have them was
both unnecessary and absurd in his eyes. He simply could not imagine
the possibility of a woman caring so much for the precepts or the glory
of God, that she was ready for their sakes to brave imprisonment,
torture, or death.

Meanwhile Alice and her fellow-prisoner, Rachel Potkin, were engaged in
trying their scheme of living on next to nothing. We must not forget
that even poor people, at that time, lived much better than now, so far
as eating is concerned. The Spanish noblemen who came over with Queen
Mary's husband were greatly astonished to find the English peasants, as
they said, "living in hovels, and faring like princes." The poorest
then never contented themselves with plain fare, such as we think tea
and bread, which are now nearly all that many poor peop