above all before one who was believed to harbour the idolater, even
the priest of the groves."

Jeph directed that the next supply should come to the Deanery, as one
who had the right of ownership, and Stead submitted, only with the
secret resolve that Dr. Eales should not want his few eggs nor his
pat of fresh butter.

Jeph was not unkind to Stead, and took him to dine with the other
attendants of the officers in the very stone hall where he had eaten
that Christmas dinner some twenty months before. There was a very
long grace pronounced extempore, and the guests were stout, resolute,
grave-looking men, who kept on their steeple-crowned hats all the
time and conversed in low, deep voices, chiefly, as far as Stead
could gather, on military matters, but they seemed to appreciate good
beef and ale quite as much as any Cavalier trooper could have done.
One of them noticing Stead asked whether he had come to take service
with the saints and enjoy their dominion, but Jeph answered for him
that his call lay at home among those of his own household, until his
heart should be whole with the cause.

On the whole Stead was proud to see Jeph holding his own, though the
youngest among these determined-looking men. These two years had
made a man of the rough, idle, pleasure-loving boy, and a man after
the Ironsides' fashion, grave, self-contained, and self-depending.
Stead had been more like the elder than the younger brother in old
times, but he felt Jeph immeasurably his elder in the new, unfamiliar
atmosphere; and yet the boy had a strong sense that all was not
right; that these were interlopers in the kind old Dean's house; that
the talk about Baal was mere absurdity; and the profanation of the