It was two years since the lad had gone to Rheims, and it would be five years more, she knew (since he was not over quick at his books), before he would return a priest.  She had letters from him:  one would come now and again, a month or two sometimes after the date of writing.  It was only in September that she had had the letter which he had written her on hearing of her father’s death, and Mr. Manners had died in June.  She had written back to him then, a discreet and modest letter enough, telling him of how Mr. Simpson had read mass over the body before it was taken down to Derby for the burying; and telling him, too, of her mother’s rheumatics that kept her abed now three parts of the year.  For the rest, the letters were dull enough reading to one who did not understand them:  the news the lad had to give was of a kind that must be disguised, lest the letters should fall into other hands, since it concerned the coming and going of priests whose names must not appear.  Yet, for all that, the letters were laid up in a press, and the heap grew slowly.

It was Mr. Anthony Babington who was come now to see her, and it was his third visit since the summer.  But she knew well enough what he was come for, since his young wife, whom he had married last year, was no use to him in such matters:  she had lately had a child, too, and lived quietly at Dethick with her women.  His letters, too, would come at intervals, carried by a rider, or sometimes some farmer’s man on his way home from Derby, and these letters, too, held dull reading enough for such as were not in the secret.  Yet the magistrates at Derby would have given a good sum if they could have intercepted and understood them.

It was in the upper parlour now that she received him.  A fire was burning there, as it had burned so long ago, when Robin found her fresh from her linen, and Anthony sat down in the same place.  She sat by the window, with the paper in her hands at which she had been writing when she first saw him.

He had news for her, of two kinds, and, like a man, gave her first that which she least wished to hear. (She had first showed him the paper.)

“That was the very matter I was come about,” he said.  “You have only a few of the names, I see.  Now the rest will be over before Christmas, and will all be in London together.”

“Can you not give me the names?” she said.

“I could give you the names, certainly.  And I will do so before I leave; I have them here.  But—­Mistress Marjorie, could you not come to London with me?  It would ease the case very much.”

“Why, I could not,” she said.  “My mother—­And what good would it serve?”