Her father,
it is true, was but a Derby lawyer, but he and his wife had a good
little estate above the Hathersage valley, and a stone house in it. As
for religion, that was all well too. Master Manners was as good a
Catholic as Master Audrey himself; and the families met at mass perhaps
as much as four or five times in the year, either at Padley, where Sir
Thomas' chapel still had priests coming and going; sometimes at Dethick
in the Babingtons' barn; sometimes as far north as Harewood.

And now a man's trouble was come upon the boy. The cause of it was as
follows.

Robin Audrey was no more religious than a boy of seventeen should be.
Yet he had had as few doubts about the matter as if he had been a monk.
His mother had taught him well, up to the time of her death ten years
ago; and he had learned from her, as well as from his father when that
professor spoke of it at all, that there were two kinds of religion in
the world, the true and the false--that is to say, the Catholic religion
and the other one. Certainly there were shades of differences in the
other one; the Turk did not believe precisely as the ancient Roman, nor
yet as the modern Protestant--yet these distinctions were subtle and
negligible; they were all swallowed up in an unity of falsehood. Next he
had learned that the Catholic religion was at present blown upon by many
persons in high position; that pains and penalties lay upon all who
adhered to it. Sir Thomas FitzHerbert, for instance, lay now in the
Fleet in London on that very account. His own father, too, three or four
times in the year, was under necessity of paying over heavy sums for the
privilege of not attending Protestant worship; and, indeed, had been
forced last year to sell a piece of land over on Lees Moor for this very
purpose. Priests came and went at their peril.... He himself had fought
two or three battles over the affair in St. Peter's churchyard, until he
had learned to hold his tongue. But all this was just part of the game.
It seemed to him as inevitable and eternal as the changes of the
weather. Matstead Church, he knew, had once been Catholic; but how long
ago he did not care to inquire. He only knew that for awhile there had
been some doubt on the matter; and that before Mr. Barton's time, who
was now minister there, there had been a proper priest in the place, who
had read English prayers there and a sort of a mass, which he had
attended as a little boy. Then this had ceased;