d covetous, and unpitiful.
I know not if it be true or no. But that they writ him down an
heretic, as also they did his father, and Archdeacon Baldok--so much I
know."

I felt afraid to ask more, and yet I had great longing to hear it.

"And my mother?" said I. I think I was like one that passes round and
round a matter, each time a little nearer than before--wishing, and yet
fearing, to come to the kernel of it.

"I have heard somewhat of her," said Joan, "from the Lady Julian my
grandmother. She was a Leybourne born, and she wedded my grandfather,
Sir John de Hastings, whose stepmother was the Lady Isabel La Despenser,
your father's sister. I think, from what she told me, your mother was a
little like--Sister Roberga."

I am sorely afraid I ought not to have answered as I did, for it
was--"The blessed saints forfend!"

"Not altogether," said Joan, with a little laugh. "I never heard that
she was ill-tempered. On the contrary, I imagine, she was somewhat too
easy; but I meant, a little like what Mother Gaillarde calls a
butterfly--with no concern for realities--frivolous, and lacking in due
thought."

"Was your grandmother, the Lady Julian, an admirer of these new
doctrines?" said I.

"They were scarcely known in her day as they have been since," said
Joan; "only the first leaves, so to speak, were above the soil: but so
far as I can judge from what I know, I should say, not so. She was a
great stickler for old ways and the authority of the Church."

"And your mother?" I was coming near delicate ground, I felt, now.

"Oh! she, I should say, would have liked our doctrines better. Mother
Annora, is there blue enough here, or shall I put on another coat?"

Joan looked up at me as she spoke. I said I thought it was deep enough,
and she might now begin the shading. Her head went down again to her
work.

"My mother," said she, "was no bigot, nor did she much love priests; I
dare venture to say, had Father Wycliffe written then as he has now, she
would somewhat have supported him so far as lay in her power. But my
father, I think, would have loved these doctrines best of all. I have
heard say he spoke against the ill lives of the clergy, and the idle
doings of the Mendicant Friars: and little as I was when he departed to
God, I can myself remember that he used to tell me stories of our Lord
and the ancient saints and patriarchs, which I know, now that I can read
it, to have come out of God's Word.