who had a better place, informed him that a widow woman had descried her
son among the rioters.

'Is that all?' said the secretary, turning his face homewards. 'Well! I
think this looks a little more like business!'

Chapter 51

Promising as these outrages were to Gashford's view, and much like
business as they looked, they extended that night no farther. The
soldiers were again called out, again they took half-a-dozen prisoners,
and again the crowd dispersed after a short and bloodless scuffle. Hot
and drunken though they were, they had not yet broken all bounds and
set all law and government at defiance. Something of their habitual
deference to the authority erected by society for its own preservation
yet remained among them, and had its majesty been vindicated in time,
the secretary would have had to digest a bitter disappointment.

By midnight, the streets were clear and quiet, and, save that there
stood in two parts of the town a heap of nodding walls and pile of
rubbish, where there had been at sunset a rich and handsome building,
everything wore its usual aspect. Even the Catholic gentry and
tradesmen, of whom there were many resident in different parts of the
City and its suburbs, had no fear for their lives or property, and
but little indignation for the wrong they had already sustained in
the plunder and destruction of their temples of worship. An honest
confidence in the government under whose protection they had lived for
many years, and a well-founded reliance on the good feeling and right
thinking of the great mass of the community, with whom, notwithstanding
their religious differences, they were every day in habits of
confidential, affectionate, and friendly intercourse, reassured them,
even under the excesses that had been committed; and convinced them that
they who were Protestants in anything but the name, were no more to
be considered as abettors of these disgraceful occurrences, than they
themselves were chargeable with the uses of the block, the rack, the
gibbet, and the stake in cruel Mary's reign.

The clock was on the stroke of one, when Gabriel Varden, with his
lady and Miss Miggs, sat waiting in the little parlour. This fact; the
toppling wicks of the dull, wasted candles; the silence that prevailed;
and, above all, the nightcaps of both maid and matron, were sufficient
evidence that they had been prepared for bed some time ago, and had some
reason for sitting up so far beyond their