I arose with alacrity. It was just what I had been longing to do. Margaret did not ask Philippa to go with us, for which I was very glad. We left her to her own meditations, and went first up to the attic from which (the house being much higher than its neighbors) we had a very nice view over the city. I looked at once for the little, old almshouses where I was wont to go with my aunt and cousins, but I could not find them at all.
"Where is the green field where the almshouses used to stand?" said I. "I am sure we used to see it from here."
"There is still a bit of it left—yonder by that old tree!" answered Mistress Hall. "You may also see two or three of the cottages, but no one has been put there for a long time. My husband heard that the whole ground was to be granted to some great man about the court!"
"What a shame!" said I.
Mistress Hall put her finger on her lip.
"Blame not the king—no, not in thy bed-chamber!" said she. "There are more than you that think so, but no one dares speak as things are now, and it behooves us specially to be careful, being always in danger of an attaint of heresy."
"You are of the new religion then?" I ventured to say.
"Nay, we are of the old religion—as old as the Word of God himself," said she smiling sweetly. "My husband, like my father, reads the Holy Scripture in his family every day. I suppose, dear maiden, it is new to you."
I told her I had never seen more of it than I had read in mine uncle's great book as a child, adding that I had been taught to think it was at the peril of salvation that common, unlearned folk meddled with the word of Scripture, which was the reason that it was kept in the Latin.
"The multitudes who followed our Lord on earth and listened to his blessed words, and the thousands who heard the discourses of Saint Peter and the other apostles, were doubtless most of them unlearned men. Yet our Lord and the apostles spoke to them in what was then the vulgar tongue!" said Mistress Hall, gently. "Did they then put these poor souls in peril of their salvation? And for what was the wonderful gift of tongues bestowed upon the apostles, save that the common people where they traveled might hear, each in the tongue wherein he was born, the wonderful works of God?"