re sure promises to her,
and grace is with her to purify herself, even though it be obscured for
a time. Be not of little faith, but believe that Christ is with us in
the ship, though He seem to be asleep."

He spoke as much to his friend as to the youth, and there can be no
doubt that this consideration was the restraining force with many who
have been stigmatised as half-hearted Reformers, because though they
loved truth, they feared to lose unity.

He was a great loss at that especial time, as a restraining power,
trusted by the innovators, and a personal friend both of King and
Cardinal, and his preaching and catechising were sorely missed at Saint
Paul's.

Tibble Steelman, though thinking he did not go far enough, deplored him
deeply; but Tibble himself was laid by for many days. The epidemic went
through the Dragon court, though some had it lightly, and only two young
children actually died of it. It laid a heavy hand on Tibble, and as
his distaste for women rendered his den almost inaccessible to Bet
Smallbones, who looked after most of the patients, Stephen Birkenholt,
whose nursing capacities had been developed in Newgate, spent his spare
hours in attending him, sat with him in the evenings, slept on a pallet
by his side, carried him his meals and often administered them, and
finally pulled him through the illness and its effects, which left him
much broken and never likely to be the same man again.

Old Mistress Headley, who was already failing, did not have the actual
disease severely, but she never again left her bed, and died just after
Christmas, sinking slowly away with little pain, and her memory having
failed from the first.

Household affairs had thus slipped so gradually into Dennet's hands that
no change of government was perceptible, except that the keys hung at
the maiden's girdle. She had grown out of the child during this winter
of trouble, and was here, there, and everywhere, the busy nurse and
housewife, seldom pausing to laugh or play except with her father, and
now and then to chat with her old friend and playfellow, Kit Smallbones.
Her childish freedom of manner had given way to grave discretion, not
to say primness, in her behaviour to her father's guests, and even the
apprentices. It was, of course, the unconscious reaction of the
maidenly spirit, aware that she had nothing but her own modesty to
protect her. She was on a small scale, with no pretensions to beauty,
but with a f