Mistress Alice
was one of those folks who so long as they are answered in words are
content; and Marjorie so answered her. And all the while she thought
upon Robin, and his passionate old father, and attempted to understand
the emotions that fought in the heart that had so disclosed itself to
her--its aged obstinacy, its loyalty and its confused honourableness.
She knew very well that he would do what he conceived to be his duty
with all the more zeal if it were an unpleasant duty; and she thanked
God that it was not for a good while yet that the lad would come home a
priest.
CHAPTER VIII
I
The warning which she had had with regard to her friends, and which she
wrote on to them at once, received its fulfilment within a very few
weeks. Mr. John, who was on the eve of departure for London again to
serve his brother there, who was back again in the Fleet by now, wrote
that he knew very well that they were all under suspicion, that he had
sent on to his son the message she had given, but that he hoped they
would yet weather the storm.
"And as to yourself, Mistress Marjorie," he wrote, "this makes it all
the more necessary that Booth's Edge should not be suspected; for what
will our men do if Padley be closed to them? You have heard of our
friend Mr. Garlick's capture? But that was no fault of yours. The man
was warned. I hear that they will send him into banishment, only, this
time."
* * * * *
The news came to her as she sat in the garden over her needlework on a
hot evening in June.
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