ked the ministers and their sermons and their
"prophesyings" with all the healthy ardour of prejudice. Once in the
year did Dick approach the sacraments, and a great business he made of
it, being unusually morose before them and almost indecently boisterous
after them. He was feudal to the very heart of him; and it was his
feudality that made him faithful to his religion as well as to his
masters, for either of which he would resolutely have died. And what in
the world he would do when he discovered, at Easter, that the objects of
his fidelity were to take opposite courses, Robin could not conceive.

As they rode in at last, Robin, who had fallen silent again after Dick's
last piece of respectful vehemence, suddenly beat his own leg with his
whip and uttered an inaudible word. It seemed to Dick that the young
master had perceived clearly that which plainly had been worrying him
all the way home, and that he did not like it.

CHAPTER V

I

Mr. Manners sat in his parlour ten days after the beginning of Lent,
full of his Sunday dinner and of perplexing thoughts all at once. He had
eaten well and heartily after his week of spare diet, and then, while in
high humour with all the world, first his wife and then his daughter had
laid before him such revelations that all the pleasure of digestion was
gone. It was but three minutes ago that Marjorie had fled from him in a
torrent of tears, for which he could not see himself responsible, since
he had done nothing but make the exclamations and comments that should
be expected of a father in such a case.

The following were the points for his reflection--to begin with those
that touched him less closely.

First that his friend Mr. Audrey, whom he had always looked upon with
reverence and a kind of terror because of his hotness in matters of
politics and religion, had capitulated to the enemy and was to go to
church at Easter. Mr. Manners himself had something of timidity in his
nature: he was conservative certainly, and practised, when he could
without bringing himself into open trouble, the old religion in which he
had been brought up. He, like the younger generation, had been educated
at Derby Grammar School, and in his youth had sat with his parents in
the nave of the old Cluniac church of St. James to hear mass. He had
then entered his father's office in Derby, about the time that the
Religious Houses had fallen, and had transferred the scene of his
worship to St.