fought; he had been chastised; he had robed the effigy of his pious
founder in a patched doublet with a saucepan on his head (but that had
been done before he had learned veneration)--and so had gone home again
to Matstead, proficient in Latin, English, history, writing, good
manners and chess, to live with his father, to hunt, to hear mass when a
priest was within reasonable distance, to indite painful letters now and
then on matters of the estate, and to learn how to bear himself
generally as should one of Master's rank--the son of a gentleman who
bore arms, and his father's father before him. He dined at twelve, he
supped at six, he said his prayers, and blessed himself when no
strangers were by. He was something of a herbalist, as a sheer hobby of
his own; he went to feed his falcons in the morning, he rode with them
after dinner (from last August he had found himself riding north more
often than south, since Marjorie lived in that quarter); and now all had
been crowned last Christmas Eve, when in the enclosed garden at her
house he had kissed her two hands suddenly, and made her a little speech
he had learned by heart; after which he kissed her on the lips as a man
should, in the honest noon sunlight.

All this was as it should be. There were no doubts or disasters
anywhere. Marjorie was an only daughter as he an only son. Her father,
it is true, was but a Derby lawyer, but he and his wife had a good
little estate above the Hathersage valley, and a stone house in it. As
for religion, that was all well too. Master Manners was as good a
Catholic as Master Audrey himself; and the families met at mass perhaps
as much as four or five times in the year, either at Padley, where Sir
Thomas' chapel still had priests coming and going; sometimes at Dethick
in the Babingtons' barn; sometimes as far north as Harewood.

And now a man's trouble was come upon the boy. The cause of it was as