"Look you," she said, after that momentary pause, "it is my step-dame, not my father, that is verily a Marnell. The lady whom you wot of was her grandame—to wit, her father's mother."
"Of no kin to you, then?" asked Avice, in a tone in which Frideswide fancied she heard a shade of disappointment.
"Nay, that can I not rightly say," was the reply: "for Dame Agnes Lovell, the Lady's mother, which was by birth a Greenhalgh, was sister unto Mistress Ladreyne Clitheroe, whose daughter Maud was my grandmother. So you shall see we are near of kin."
A cousin thrice removed would not now be thought a very near relation; but in past times much more was made of "kindly blood" than at present.
Avice did not answer, and Frideswide, having recovered her courage, spoke up boldly. For a hundred years her ancestors had been of the Lollard faith, and she was far more disposed to glory in the fact than to be ashamed of it.
"Wherefore? Are you of that learning?"
"Hush, gramercy!" cried Avice under her breath.
"Wherefore?" asked Frideswide again.
"Dear heart, if any should o'erhear us!" explained Avice. "Know you not that 'tis a dangerous matter to speak thereof?"
"It may be worse to let be," answered Frideswide thoughtfully. She was thinking of a story of twenty years ago, which she had heard most sorrowfully told by the lips of the Lady Idonia, how she had at one time fallen away for fear, and had never forgotten her defection nor forgiven herself.