“A man commonly ceases to be a fool when he begins to reckon himself one.”
“You know not the worst yet. But—Mr Marshall, if I tell it you, you will not betray me, for my poor old grandmother’s sake? I never gave her much cause to love me, but I know she doth, and it would grieve her if I came to public hurt and shame.”
“It would grieve me, my cousin, more than you know. Fear not, but speak freely.”
“Well,—I know not if my grandmother told you that I was intimate with some of these poor gentlemen that have paid the penalty of their treason of late?”
“I know that you knew Percy and Winter—and, I dare say, Rookwood.”
“I knew them all, and Catesby too. And though I was not privy to the plot—not quite so bad as that!—yet I would have followed Mr Tom Winter almost anywhere,—ay, even into worse than I did.”
“Surely, Aubrey Louvaine, you never dreamed of perversion!”
“Mr Marshall, I was ready to do anything Tom Winter bade me; but he never meddled with my religion. And—come, I may as well make a clean breast, as I have begun—I loved Dorothy Rookwood, and if she had held up a finger, I should have gone after. You think the Rookwoods Protestants, don’t you? They are not.”
Mr Marshall sat in dismayed silence, for a moment.
“I doubted them somewhat,” he said: “but I never knew so much as you have told me. Then Mrs Dorothy—”