ass or receive the sacraments. The Lieutenant, Sir Edward
Walsingham, who had been his friend, had told him that he would very
gladly have given him liberties of this kind, but that he dared not, for
fear of the King's displeasure.

"But I told him," said More, "not to trouble himself that I liked his
cheer well enough as it was, and if ever I did not he was to put me out
of his doors."

After a little more talk he showed Ralph what he was writing. It was a
treatise called a "Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation."

"It is to persuade myself," he said, "that I am no more a prisoner than
I was before; I know I am, but sometimes forget it. We are all God's
prisoners."

Ralph glanced down the page just written and was astonished at its good
humour.

"Some prisoner of another gaol," he read, "singeth, danceth in his two
fetters, and feareth not his feet for stumbling at a stone; while God's
prisoner, that hath but his one foot fettered by the gout, lieth
groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear there would
fall on his foot no more than a cushion."

* * * * *

Ralph went straight up the river from the Tower to Chelsea to take them
news of the prisoner, and was silent and moody as he went. He had been
half touched and half enraged by More's bearing--touched by his
simplicity and cheerfulness and enraged by his confidence in a bad
cause.

Mrs. Alice More behaved as usual when he got there: she had a genius for
the obvious; commented on the weariness of living in one room, the
distress at the thought that one was fastened in at the will of another;
deplored the plainness of the prison fare, and the folly of her husband
in refusing an oath that she herself and her children and the vast
majority of the prominent persons in England had found so simple in
accepting. She left nothing unsaid.

Finally, she apologized for the plainness of her dress.

"You must think me a slattern, Mr. Torridon, but I cannot help it. I
have not the heart nor the means, now that my man is in prison, to do
better."

And her solemn eyes filled with tears.

When he had given the news to the family he went aside from the group in
the garden to where Beatrice Atherton was sitting below the Jesu tree,
with work on her lap.

He had noticed as he talked that she was sitting there, and had raised
his voice for her benefit. He fancied, and with a pleasure at the
delicate instinct, that she did n