“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Torridon,” he said, “I knew you would not forget an old friend, even though he could not take your counsel.  I daresay you have come to give it me again, however.”

“If I thought you would take it,” began Ralph.

“But I will not,” said More smiling, “no more than before.  Sit down, Mr. Torridon.”

Ralph had come at Cromwell’s suggestion, and with a very great willingness of his own, too.  He knew he could not please Beatrice more than by visiting her friend, and he himself was pleased and amused to think that he could serve his master’s interests from one side and his own from another by one action.

He talked a little about the oath again, and mentioned how many had taken it during the last week or two.

“I am pleased that they can do it with a good conscience,” observed More.  “And now let us talk of other matters.  If I would not do it for my daughter’s sake, who begged me, I would not do it for the sake of both the Houses of Parliament, nor even, dear Mr. Torridon, for yours and Master Cromwell’s.”

Ralph saw that it was of no use, and began to speak of other things.  He gave him news of Chelsea.

“They are not very merry there,” he said, “and I hardly suppose you would wish them to be.”

“Why not?” cried More, with a beaming face, “I am merry enough.  I would not be a monk; so God hath compelled me to be one, and treats me as one of His own spoilt children.  He setteth me on His lap and dandleth me.  I have never been so happy.”

He told Ralph presently that his chief sorrow was that he could not go to mass or receive the sacraments.  The Lieutenant, Sir Edward Walsingham, who had been his friend, had told him that he would very gladly have given him liberties of this kind, but that he dared not, for fear of the King’s displeasure.

“But I told him,” said More, “not to trouble himself that I liked his cheer well enough as it was, and if ever I did not he was to put me out of his doors.”

After a little more talk he showed Ralph what he was writing.  It was a treatise called a “Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.”

“It is to persuade myself,” he said, “that I am no more a prisoner than I was before; I know I am, but sometimes forget it.  We are all God’s prisoners.”

Ralph glanced down the page just written and was astonished at its good humour.

“Some prisoner of another gaol,” he read, “singeth, danceth in his two fetters, and feareth not his feet for stumbling at a stone; while God’s prisoner, that hath but his one foot fettered by the gout, lieth groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear there would fall on his foot no more than a cushion.”

* * * * *

Ralph went straight up the river from the Tower to Chelsea to take them news of the prisoner, and was silent and moody as he went.  He had been half touched and half enraged by More’s bearing—­touched by his simplicity and cheerfulness and enraged by his confidence in a bad cause.