Now the students had returned to Oxford, the sickness had abated, and Dr. Langton had brought his daughters back to their beloved home.  But the visits of John Clarke still continued to be frequent.  It was but a short walk through the meadows from Cardinal College to the Bridge House.  On many a pleasant evening, his work being done, the young master would sally forth to see his friends; and one pair of soft eyes had learned to glow and sparkle at sight of him, as his tall, slight figure in its dark gown was to be seen approaching.  Magdalen Langton, at least, never wearied of any discussion which might take place in her presence, if John Clarke were one of the disputants.

And, indeed, the beautiful sisters were themselves able to follow, if not to take part in, most of the learned disquisitions which took place at their home.  Their father had educated them with the greatest care, consoling himself for the early loss of his wife and the lack of sons by superintending the education of his twin daughters, and instructing them not only in such elementary matters as reading and writing (often thought more than sufficient for a woman’s whole stock in trade of learning), but in the higher branches of knowledge—­in grammar, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as in the Latin and French languages, and in that favourite study of his, the Greek language, which had fallen so long into disrepute in Oxford, and had only been revived with some difficulty and no small opposition a few years previously.

But just latterly the talk at the Bridge House had concerned itself less with learned matters of Greek and Roman lore, or the problems of the heavenly bodies, than with those more personal and burning questions of the day, which had set so many thinking men to work to inquire of their own consciences how far they could approve the action of church and state in refusing to allow men to think and read for themselves, where their own salvation (as many argued) was at stake.

It was not the first time that a little group of earnest thinkers had been gathered together at Dr. Langton’s house.  The physician was a person held in high esteem in Oxford.  He took no open part now in her counsels, he gave no lectures; he lived the life of a recluse, highly esteemed and respected.  He would have been a bold man who would have spoken ill of him or his household, and therefore it seemed to him that he could very well afford to take the risk of receiving young men here, who desired to speak freely amongst themselves and one another in places not so liable to be dominated by listening ears as the rooms of the colleges and halls whence they came.