a fool when he begins to reckon himself
one."

"You know not the worst yet. But--Mr Marshall, if I tell it you, you
will not betray me, for my poor old grandmother's sake? I never gave
her much cause to love me, but I know she doth, and it would grieve her
if I came to public hurt and shame."

"It would grieve me, my cousin, more than you know. Fear not, but speak
freely."

"Well,--I know not if my grandmother told you that I was intimate with
some of these poor gentlemen that have paid the penalty of their treason
of late?"

"I know that you knew Percy and Winter--and, I dare say, Rookwood."

"I knew them all, and Catesby too. And though I was not privy to the
plot--not quite so bad as that!--yet I would have followed Mr Tom
Winter almost anywhere,--ay, even into worse than I did."

"Surely, Aubrey Louvaine, you never dreamed of perversion!"

"Mr Marshall, I was ready to do anything Tom Winter bade me; but he
never meddled with my religion. And--come, I may as well make a clean
breast, as I have begun--I loved Dorothy Rookwood, and if she had held
up a finger, I should have gone after. You think the Rookwoods
Protestants, don't you? They are not."

Mr Marshall sat in dismayed silence, for a moment.

"I doubted them somewhat," he said: "but I never knew so much as you
have told me. Then Mrs Dorothy--"

"Oh, she would have none of me. She told me I was a beggar and a fool
both, and she spake but the bitter truth. Yet it was bitter when she
said it."

"My poor boy!" said Mr Marshall, compassionately.

"I thought Hans but a fool when he went and bound himself to yon
mercer--he, the son of a Dutch Baron! But I see now--I was the fool,
not he. Had I spent my days in selling silk stockings instead of
wearing them, and taken my wages home to my mother like a good little
boy, it had been better for me. I see, now,--now that the doors are all
shut against me, and I dare not go home."

"Yet tell me, Aubrey, for I scarce understand it--why dare you not go
home?"

As Aubrey laid the matter before him from the point of view presented by
Lady Oxford, Mr Marshall's face grew graver every moment. He began to
see that the circumstances were much more serious than he had
apprehended. There was silence for a few minutes when Aubrey finished
his account. Then the clergyman said--

"'Tis a tangle, and a tight one, my boy. Yet, by God's blessing, we may
see our way out. Let us take one point at a time.