use a great
thing had disclosed itself to them in which two or three large
principles were present, and no more. There was that love of one
another, whose consummation seemed imperilled, for how could these two
ever wed if Robin were to quarrel with his father? There was the
Religion which was in their bones and blood--the Religion for which
already they had suffered and their fathers before them. There was the
honour and loyalty which this new and more personal suffering demanded
now louder than ever; and in Marjorie at least, as will be seen more
plainly later, there was a strong love of Jesus Christ and His Mother,
whom she knew, from her hidden crucifix and her beads, and her Jesus
Psalter--which she used every day--as well as in her own soul--to be
wandering together once more among the hills of Derbyshire, sheltering,
at peril of Their lives, in stables and barns and little secret
chambers, because there was no room for Them in Their own places. It was
this last consideration, as Robin had begun to guess, that stood
strongest in the girl; it was this, too, as again he had begun to guess,
that made her all that she was to him, that gave her that strange
serious air of innocency and sweetness, and drew from him a love that
was nine-tenths reverence and adoration. (He always kissed her hands
first, it will be remembered, before her lips.)

So then they sat and considered and talked. They did not speak much of
her Grace, nor of her Grace's religion, nor of her counsellors and
affairs of state: these things were but toys and vanities compared with
matters of love and faith; neither did they speak much of the
Commissioners that had been to Derbyshire once and would come again, or
of the alarms and the dangers and the priest hunters, since those things
did not at present touch them very closely. It was rather of Robin's
father, and whether and when the maid should tell her parents, and how
this new trouble would conflict with their love. They spoke, that is to
say, of their own business and of God's; and of nothing else. The frosty
sunshine crept down the painted wainscot and lay at last at their feet,
reddening to rosiness....

III

Robin rode away at last with a very clear idea of what he was to do in
the immediate present, and with no idea at all of what was to be done
later. Marjorie had given him three things--advice; a pair of beads that
had been the property of Mr. Cuthbert Maine, seminary priest, recently
e