at were unfamiliar to
the conversationalists, was a very hard burden, and he counted such
things as the price he must pay for his occasional duty visits to his
parents. He could not help respecting the piety of his father, but he
was none the less bored by it; and the atmosphere of silent cynicism
that seemed to hang round his mother was his only relief. He thought he
understood her, and it pleased him sometimes to watch her, to calculate
how she would behave in any little domestic crisis or incident that
affected her, to notice the slight movement of her lips and her eyelids
gently lowering and rising again in movements of extreme annoyance. But
even this was not sufficient compensation for the other drawbacks of
life at Overfield Court, and it was with a very considerable relief that
he stepped into his carriage at last towards the end of July, nodded and
smiled once more to his father who was watching him from the terrace
steps with a wistful and puzzled face, anxious to please, and heard the
first crack of the whip of his return journey.

He had, indeed, a certain excuse for going, for a despatch-rider had
come down from London with papers for him from Sir Thomas Cromwell, and
it was not hard to assume a serious face and announce that he was
recalled by affairs; and there was sufficient truth in it, too, for one
of the memoranda bore on the case of Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of
Kent, and announced her apprehension. Cromwell however, did not actually
recall him, but mentioned the fact of her arrest, and asked if he had
heard much said of her in the country, and what the opinion of her was
in that district.

* * * * *

The drive up to London seemed very short to him now; he went slowly
through the bundle of papers on which he had to report, annotating them
in order here and there, and staring out of the window now and again
with unseeing eyes. There were a dozen cases on which he was engaged,
which had been forwarded to him during his absence in the country--the
priest at High Hatch was reported to have taken a wife, and Cromwell
desired information about this; Ralph had ridden out there one day and
gossipped a little outside the parsonage; an inn-keeper a few miles to
the north of Cuckfield had talked against the divorce and the reigning
Consort; a mistake had been made in the matter of a preaching license,
and Cranmer had desired Cromwell to look into it; a house had been sold