He fell to stroking her hand again at that, but she drew it away.

“Not until you have told me,” she said.

So then he told her.

It was a long tale, for it began as far ago as last August, when his father had come back from giving evidence before the justices at Derby on a matter of witchcraft, and had been questioned again about his religion.  It was then that Robin had seen moodiness succeed to anger, and long silence to moodiness.  He told the tale with a true lover’s art, for he watched her face and trained his tone and his manner as he saw her thoughts come and go in her eyes and lips, like gusts of wind across standing corn; and at last he told her outright what his father had said to him on St. Stephen’s night, and how he himself had kept silence.

Marjorie’s face was as white as a moth’s wing when he was finishing, and her eyes like sunset pools; but she flamed up bright and rosy as he finished.

“You kept silence!” she cried.

“I did not wish to anger him, my dear; he is my father,” he said gently.

The colour died out of her face again and she nodded once or twice, and a great pensiveness came down on her.  He took her hand again softly, and she did not resist.

“The only doubt,” she said presently, as if she talked to herself, “is whether you had best be gone at Easter, or stay and face it out.”

“Yes,” said Robin, with his dismay come fully to the birth.

Then she turned on him, full of a sudden tenderness and compassion.

“Oh! my Robin,” she cried, “and I have not said a word about you and your own misery.  I was thinking but of Christ’s honour.  You must forgive me....  What must it be for you!...  That it should be your father!  You are sure that he means it?”

“My father does not speak until he means it.  He is always like that.  He asks counsel from no one.  He thinks and he thinks, and then he speaks; and it is finished.”

She fell then to thinking again, her sweet lips compressed together, and her eyes frightened and wondering, searching round the hanging above the chimney-breast. (It presented Icarus in the chariot of the sun; and it was said in Derby that it had come from my lord Abbot’s lodging at Bolton.)

Meantime Robin thought too.  He was as wax in the hands of this girl, and knew it, and loved that it should be so.  Yet he could not help his dismay while he waited for her seal to come down on him and stamp him to her model.  For he foresaw more clearly than ever now the hundred inconveniences that must follow, now that it was evident that to Marjorie’s mind (and therefore to God Almighty’s) there must be no tampering with the old religion.  He had known that it must be so; yet he had thought, on the way here, of a dozen families he knew who, in his own memory, had changed from allegiance to the Pope of Rome to that of her Grace, without seeming one penny the worse.  There were the Martins,