"Have you heard the news?" said Sheffield; "I
have been long enough in college to pick it up. The kitchen-man was full
of it as I passed along. Jack's a particular friend of mine, a good
honest fellow, and has all the gossip of the place. I don't know what it
means, but Oxford has just now a very bad inside. The report is, that
some of the men have turned Romans; and they say that there are
strangers going about Oxford whom no one knows anything of. Jack, who is
a bit of a divine himself, says he heard the Principal say that, for
certain, there were Jesuits at the bottom of it; and I don't know what
he means, but he declares he saw with his own eyes the Pope walking down
High Street with the priest. I asked him how he knew it; he said he knew
the Pope by his slouching hat and his long beard; and the porter told
him it was the Pope. The Dons have met several times; and several tutors
are to be discommoned, and their names stuck up against the
buttery-door. Meanwhile the Marshal, with two bulldogs, is keeping guard
before the Catholic chapel; and, to complete it, that old drunken fellow
Topham is reported, out of malice, when called in to cut the Warden of
St. Mary's hair, to have made a clean white tonsure atop of him."

"My dear Sheffield, how you run on!" said Reding. "Well, do you know, I
can tell you a piece of real news bearing on these reports, and not of
the pleasantest. Did you know Willis of St. George's?"

"I think I once saw him at wine in your rooms; a modest, nice-looking
fellow, who never spoke a word."

"Ah, I assure you, he has a tongue in his head when it suits him,"
answered Charles: "yet I do think," he added, musingly, "he's very much
changed, and not for the better."

"Well, what's the upshot?" asked Sheffield.

"He has turned Catholic," said Charles.

"What a fool!" cried Sheffield.

There was a pause. Charles felt awkward: then he said, "I can't say I
was surprised; yet I should have been less surprised at White."

"Oh, White won't turn Catholic," said Sheffield; "he hasn't it in him.
He's a coward."

"Fools and cowards!" answered Charles: "thus you divide the world,
Sheffield? Poor Willis!" he added; "one must respect a man who acts
according to his conscience."

"What can he know of conscience?" said Sheffield; "the idea of his
swallowing, of his own free-will, the heap of rubbish which every
Catholic has to believe! in cold blood tying a collar round his neck,
and politely putting th