"How could you think it?" he exclaimed again, protestingly.
"Dry up your tears, Heinrich!" Herman exclaimed hastily. "I never doubted you. I only wanted you to know the consequences of a careless word, for it might mean death to one or many of your friends."
"And you can trust me?"
"As much as I can trust myself," Herman answered.
"Then I am content. Come! Let us be going, for Mistress Margaret will be anxious since I have been so long away."
Before many minutes had gone they had passed through the doorway of rock which the eagle eyes of the keenest of the Familiars would never have suspected as an entrance, then through Tyndale's room and up the secret stairs into Herman's home. His mother heard him coming, and then the story, just where they met, was told.
"I shall go and tell Margaret's father!" Herman's mother exclaimed, her eyes gleaming with gladness; and although it was night, and the streets were dangerous for a woman to venture out, the thought of a father's and a sick mother's inexpressible anxiety, more painful because of her sense of helplessness, induced her to undertake the errand.
They kept each other company up to the point where they were compelled to part.
"Where is Mistress Margaret?" Herman asked, when he and Heinrich, watching his mother disappear at the bend of a street, turned into an alley.
"That's my secret," came the laughing answer. "Come and see."