e a
courteous little gesture, as if to invite his father to sit down; and as
the other did so, slowly and shaking all over, struck at him by careful
and calculated words, delivered with a stilted and pompous air:

"You have beaten me, sir; so, of course, I obey. Yes, I told Mistress
Marjorie Manners that my father no longer counted himself a Catholic,
and would publicly turn Protestant at Easter, so as to please her Grace
and be in favour with the Court and with the county justices. And I have
told Mr. Babington so as well, and also Mr. Thomas FitzHerbert. It will
spare you the pain, sir, of making any public announcement on the
matter. It is always a son's duty to spare his father pain."

Then he bowed, wheeled, and went out of the room.

II

Two hours later Robin was still lying completely dressed on his bed in
the dark.

It was a plain little chamber where he lay, fireless, yet not too cold,
since it was wainscoted from floor to ceiling, and looked out eastwards
upon the pleasaunce, with rooms on either side of it. A couple of
presses sunk in the walls held his clothes and boots; a rush-bottomed
chair stood by the bed; and the bed itself, laid immediately on the
ground, was such as was used in most good houses by all except the
master and mistress, or any sick members of the family--a straw mattress
and a wooden pillow. His bows and arrows, with a pair of dags or
pistols, hung on a rack against the wall at the foot of his bed, and a
little brass cross engraved with a figure of the Crucified hung over it.
It was such a chamber as any son of a house might have, who was a
gentleman and not luxurious.

A hundred thoughts had gone through his mind since he had flung himself
down here shaking with passion; and these had begun already to repeat
themselves, like a turning wheel, in his head. Marjorie; his love for
her; his despair of that love; his father; all that they had been, one
to the other, in the past; the little, or worse than little, that they
would be, one to the other, in the future; the priest's face as he had
seen it three days ago; what would be done at Easter, what later--all
these things, coloured and embittered now by his own sorrow for his
words to his father, and the knowledge that he had shamed himself when
he should have suffered in silence--these things turned continually in
his head, and he was too young and too simple to extricate one from the
other all at once.

Things had come about in a