He was to walk, as before, starting after dark,
not carrying a letter this time, after all, in spite of the news that he
might have taken with him; for the priest would be back before morning
and could hear it all then at his ease.
Every possible cause of alarm had gone; and Marjorie, for the first time
for three weeks, felt very nearly as content as a year ago. Not one more
doubtful visitor had appeared anywhere; and now she thought herself
mistaken even about those solitary figures she had suspected before.
After all, they had only been a couple of men, whose faces her servants
did not know, who had gone past on the track beneath the house; one
mounted, and the other on foot.
There had been something of a reaction, too, in Derby. The deaths of the
three priests had made an impression; there was no doubt of that. Mr.
Biddell had written her a letter on the point, saying that the blood of
those martyrs might well be the peace, if it might not be the seed, of
the Church in the district. Men openly said in the taverns, he reported,
that it was hard that any should die for religion merely; politics were
one matter and religion another. Yet the deaths had dismayed the simple
Catholics, too, for the present; and at Hathersage church, scarcely ten
miles away, above two hundred came to the Protestant sermon preached
before my lord Shrewsbury on the first Sunday after.
The news of the Armada, too, had distracted men's minds wonderfully in
another direction.
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