beauty needed no illusion to be credited. Even at her age, now over
forty, the glimpse they had had in the fitful torchlight of the
cavern had been ravishing, and had confirmed all they had ever heard
of her witching loveliness; nor did they recollect how that very
obscurity might have assisted it.

To their convictions, she was the only legitimate sovereign in the
island, a confessor for their beloved Church, a captive princess and
beauty driven from her throne, and kept in durance by a usurper.
Thus every generous feeling was enlisted in her cause, with nothing
to counterbalance them save the English hatred of the Spaniard, with
whom her cause was inextricably linked; a dread of what might be
inflicted on the country in the triumph of her party; and in some, a
strange inconsistent personal loyalty to Elizabeth; but all these
they were instructed to believe mere temptations and delusions that
ought to be brushed aside as cobwebs.

Antony's Puritan tutor at Cambridge had, as Richard Talbot had
foreboded, done little but add to his detestation of the Reformation,
and he had since fallen in with several of the seminary priests who
were circulating in England. Some were devoted and pious men, who at
the utmost risk went from house to house to confirm the faith and
constancy of the old families of their own communion. The saintly
martyr spirit of one of these, whom Antony met in the house of a
kinsman of his mother, had so wrought on him as to bring him heart
and soul back to his mother's profession, in which he had been
secretly nurtured in early childhood, and which had received
additional confirmation at Sheffield, where Queen Mary and her ladies
had always shown that they regarded him as one of themselves, sure to
return to them when he was his own master. It was not, however, of