the slightly-built stripling of one-and-twenty, being a man of
great height and muscular power--power that had in no wise
diminished with advancing years, though time had turned his black
locks to iron gray, and seamed his face with a multitude of
wrinkles. Pride, passion, gloomy defiance, and bitter hatred of his
kind seemed written on that face, which in its youth must have been
handsome enough. Nicholas Trevlyn was a disappointed, embittered
man, who added to all other faults of temperament that of a
hopeless bigot of the worst kind. He was the sort of man of whom
Inquisitors must surely have been made--without pity, without
remorse, without any kind of natural feeling when once their
religious convictions were at stake.

As a young man he had watched heretics burning in Smithfield with a
fierce joy and delight; and when with the accession of Elizabeth
the tide had turned, he had submitted without a murmur to the fines
which had ruined him and driven him, a poverty-stricken dependent,
to the old Gate House. He would have died a martyr with the grim
constancy that he had seen in others, and never lamented what he
suffered for conscience' sake. But he had grown to be a thoroughly
soured and embittered man, and had spent the past twenty or more
years of his life in a ceaseless savage brooding which had made his
abode anything but a happy place for his two children, the
offspring of a late and rather peculiar marriage with a woman by
birth considerably his inferior.

The firmness without the bitterness of his father's face was
reflected in that of the son as Cuthbert fearlessly finished his
speech.