For Tibble was no impulsive Italian, but a sober-minded Englishman of sturdy good sense, and Ambrose was reasonable enough to listen and only drop in a few groats which he knew to be his own.

At the same moment, a church bell was heard, the tone of which Steelman evidently distinguished from all the others, and he led the way out of the Pardon churchyard, over the space in front of St. Paul’s.  Many persons were taking the same route; citizens in gowns and gold or silver chains, their wives in tall pointed hats; craftsmen, black-gowned scholarly men with fur caps, but there was a much more scanty proportion of priests, monks or friars, than was usual in any popular assemblage.  Many of the better class of women carried folding stools, or had them carried by their servants, as if they expected to sit and wait.

“Is there a procession toward? or a relic to be displayed?” asked Ambrose, trying to recollect whose feast-day it might be.

Tibble screwed up his mouth in an extraordinary smile as he said, “Relic quotha? yea, the soothest relic there be of the Lord and Master of us all.”

“Methought the true Cross was always displayed on the High Altar,” said Ambrose, as all turned to a side aisle of the noble nave.

“Rather say hidden,” muttered Tibble.  “Thou shalt have it displayed, young sir, but neither in wood nor gilded shrine.  See, here he comes who setteth it forth.”

From the choir came, attended by half a dozen clergy, a small, pale man, in the ordinary dress of a priest, with a square cap on his head.  He looked spare, sickly, and wrinkled, but the furrows traced lines of sweetness, his mouth was wonderfully gentle, and there was a keen brightness about his clear grey eye.  Every one rose and made obeisance as he passed along to the stone stair leading to a pulpit projecting from one of the columns.

Ambrose saw what was coming, though he had only twice before heard preaching.  The children of the ante-reformation were not called upon to hear sermons; and the few exhortations given in Lent to the monks of Beaulieu were so exclusively for the religious that seculars were not invited to them.  So that Ambrose had only once heard a weary and heavy discourse there plentifully garnished with Latin; and once he had stood among the throng at a wake at Millbrook, and heard a begging friar recommend the purchase of briefs of indulgence and the daily repetition of the Ave Maria by a series of extraordinary miracles for the rescue of desperate sinners, related so jocosely as to keep the crowd in a roar of laughter.  He had laughed with the rest, but he could not imagine his guide, with the stern, grave eyebrows, writhen features and earnest, ironical tone, covering—as even he could detect—the deepest feeling, enjoying such broad sallies as tickled the slow merriment of village clowns and forest deer-stealers.

All stood for a moment while the Paternoster was repeated.  Then the owners of stools sat down on them, some leant on adjacent pillars, others curled themselves on the floor, but most remained on their feet as unwilling to miss a word, and of these were Tibble Steelman and his companion.

Omnis qui facit peccatum, servus est peccati, followed by the rendering in English, “Whosoever doeth sin is sin’s bond thrall.”  The words answered well to the ghastly delineations that seemed stamped on Ambrose’s brain and which followed him about into the nave, so that he felt himself in the grasp of the cruel fiend, and almost expected to feel the skeleton claw of Death about to hand him over to torment.  He expected the consolation of hearing that a daily “Hail Mary,” persevered in through the foulest life, would obtain that beams should be arrested in their fall, ships fail to sink, cords to hang, till such confession had been made as should insure ultimate salvation, after such a proportion of the flames of purgatory as masses and prayers might not mitigate.

But his attention was soon caught.  Sinfulness stood before him not as the liability to penalty for transgressing an arbitrary rule, but as a taint to the entire being, mastering the will, perverting the senses, forging fetters out of habit, so as to be a loathsome horror paralysing and enchaining the whole being and making it into the likeness of him who brought sin and death into the world.  The horror seemed to grow on Ambrose, as his boyish faults and errors rushed on his mind, and he felt pervaded by the contagion of the pestilence, abhorrent even to himself.  But behold, what was he hearing now?  “The bond thrall abideth not in the house for ever, but the Son abideth ever.  Si ergo Filius liberavit, verè liberi eritis.”  “If the Son should make you free, then are ye free indeed.”  And for the first time was the true liberty of the redeemed soul comprehensibly proclaimed to the young spirit that had begun to yearn for something beyond the outside.  Light began to shine through the outward ordinances; the Church; the world, life, and death, were revealed as something absolutely new; a redeeming, cleansing, sanctifying power was made known, and seemed to inspire him with a new life, joy, and hope.  He was no longer feeling himself necessarily crushed by the fetters of death, or only delivered from absolute peril by a mechanism that had lost its heart, but he could enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, in process of being saved, not in sin but from sin.

It was an era in his life, and Tibble heard him sobbing, but with very different sobs from those in the Pardon chapel.  When it was over, and the blessing given, Ambrose looked up from the hands which had covered his face with a new radiance in his eyes, and drew a long breath.  Tibble saw that he was like one in another world, and gently led him away.

“Who is he?  What is he?  Is he an angel from Heaven?” demanded the boy, a little wildly, as they neared the southern door.

“If an angel be a messenger of God, I trow he is one,” said Tibble.  “But men call him Dr. Colet.  He is Dean of St. Paul’s Minster, and dwelleth in the house you see below there.”

“And are such words as these to be heard every Sunday?”

“On most Sundays doth he preach here in the nave to all sorts of folk.”

“I must—I must hear it again!” exclaimed Ambrose.

“Ay, ay,” said Tibble, regarding him with a well-pleased face.  “You are one with whom it works.”

“Every Sunday!” repeated Ambrose.  “Why do not all—your master and all these,” pointing to the holiday crowds going to and fro—“why do they not all come to listen?”

“Master doth come by times,” said Tibble, in the tone of irony that was hard to understand.  “He owneth the dean as a rare preacher.”

Ambrose did not try to understand.  He exclaimed again, panting as if his thoughts were too strong for his words—“Lo you, that preacher—dean call ye him?—putteth a soul into what hath hitherto been to me but a dead and empty framework.”

Tibble held out his hand almost unconsciously, and Ambrose pressed it.  Man and boy, alike they had felt the electric current of that truth, which, suppressed and ignored among man’s inventions, was coming as a new revelation to many, and was already beginning to convulse the Church and the world.

Ambrose’s mind was made up on one point.  Whatever he did, and wherever he went, he felt the doctrine he had just heard as needful to him as vital air, and he must be within reach of it.  This, and not the hermit’s cell, was what his instinct craved.  He had always been a studious, scholarly boy, supposed to be marked out for a clerical life, because a book was more to him than a bow, and he had been easily trained in good habits and practices of devotion; but all in a childish manner, without going beyond simple receptiveness, until the experiences of the last week had made a man of him, or more truly, the Pardon chapel and Dean Colet’s sermon had made him a new being, with the realities of the inner life opened before him.

His present feeling was relief from the hideous load he had felt while dwelling on the Dance of Death, and therewith general goodwill to all men, which found its first issue in compassion for Giles Headley, whom he found on his return seated on the steps—moody and miserable.

“Would that you had been with us,” said Ambrose, sitting down beside him on the step.  “Never have I heard such words as to-day.”

“I would not be seen in the street with that scarecrow,” murmured Giles.  “If my mother could have guessed that he was to be set over me, I had never come here.”

“Surely you knew that he was foreman.”

“Yea, but not that I should be under him—I whom old Giles vowed should be as his own son—I that am to wed yon little brown moppet, and be master here!  So, forsooth,” he said, “now he treats me like any common low-bred prentice.”

“Nay,” said Ambrose, “an if you were his son, he would still make you serve.  It’s the way with all craftsmen—yea and with gentlemen’s sons also.  They must be pages and squires ere they can be knights.”

“It never was the way at home.  I was only bound prentice to my father for the name of the thing, that I might have the freedom of the city, and become head of our house.”

“But how could you be a wise master without learning the craft?”

“What are journeymen for?” demanded the lad.  “Had I known how Giles Headley meant to serve me, he might have gone whistle for a husband for his wench.  I would have ridden in my Lady of Salisbury’s train.”

“You might have had rougher usage there than here,” said Ambrose.  “Master Headley lays nothing on you but what he has himself proved.  I would I could see you make the best of so happy a home.”

“Ay, that’s all very well for you, who are certain of a great man’s house.”

“Would that I were certified that my brother would be as well off as you, if you did but know it,” said Ambrose.  “Ha! here come the dishes!  ’Tis supper time come on us unawares, and Stephen not returned from Mile End!”

Punctuality was not, however, exacted on these summer Sunday evenings, when practice with the bow and other athletic sports were enjoined by Government, and, moreover, the youths were with so trustworthy a member of the household as Kit Smallbones.

Sundry City magnates had come to supper with Master Headley, and whether it were the effect of Ambrose’s counsel, or of the example of a handsome lad who had come with his father, one of the worshipful guild of Merchant Taylors, Giles did vouchsafe to bestir himself in waiting, and in consideration of the effort it must have cost him, old Mrs. Headley and her son did not take notice of his blunders, but only Dennet fell into a violent fit of laughter, when he presented the stately alderman with a nutmeg under the impression that it was an overgrown peppercorn.  She suppressed her mirth as well as she could, poor little thing, for it was a great offence in good manners, but she was detected, and, only child as she was, the consequence was the being banished from the table and sent to bed.

But when, after supper was over, Ambrose went out to see if there were any signs of the return of Stephen and the rest, he found the little maiden curled up in the gallery with her kitten in her arms.

“Nay!” she said, in a spoilt-child tone, “I’m not going to bed before my time for laughing at that great oaf!  Nurse Alice says he is to wed me, but I won’t have him!  I like the pretty boy who had the good dog and saved father, and I like you, Master Ambrose.  Sit down by me and tell me the story over again, and we shall see Kit Smallbones come home.  I know he’ll have beaten the brewer’s fellow.”

Before Ambrose had decided whether thus far to abet rebellion, she jumped up and cried: “Oh, I see Kit!  He’s got my ribbon!  He has won the match!”

And down she rushed, quite oblivious of her disgrace, and Ambrose presently saw her uplifted in Kit Smallbones’ brawny arms to utter her congratulations.

Stephen was equally excited.  His head was full of Kit Smallbones’ exploits, and of the marvels of the sports he had witnessed and joined in with fair success.  He had thought Londoners poor effeminate creatures, but he found that these youths preparing for the trained bands understood all sorts of martial exercises far better than any of his forest acquaintance, save perhaps the hitting of a mark.  He was half wild with a boy’s enthusiasm for Kit Smallbones and Edmund Burgess, and when, after eating the supper that had been reserved for the late comers, he and his brother repaired to their own chamber, his tongue ran on in description of the feats he had witnessed and his hopes of emulating them, since he understood that Archbishop as was my Lord of York, there was a tilt-yard at York House.  Ambrose, equally full of his new feelings, essayed to make his brother a sharer in them, but Stephen entirely failed to understand more than that his book-worm brother had heard something that delighted him in his own line of scholarship, from which Stephen had happily escaped a year ago!