Primrose glanced upwards through the oaken balustrade, whence the sounds of an organ played by a master hand had been throughout the meal entrancing her ear. But the heavy curtain drawn across the gallery hid the player from view, and she looked at Lady Rosamond inquiringly. "He has never confessed himself guilty of authorship," said Lady Rosamond, "but beshrew me if I tax him not anon in private with the production of your anonymous pamphlet, Master Rhys. The very name of strong drink is enough to kindle his ire, and make his eye flash scorn upon us all!" "This is indeed a singular coincidence," said the vicar. "Who then is this concealed friend of yours, from whose fingers it would seem that powerful words and sweet music alike flow with equal charm?" "He is a youth," answered Lady Rosamond, "in whom the poetic and romantic features of character derived from a mother of royal Welsh blood are so harmoniously blended with the noble and manly qualities of a noble English ancestry as to produce in himself a very impersonation of all virtues and graces! So thinks my worthy husband, who loves the youth as a dear younger brother, and I promise you I come not far behind him in my own good opinion of the boy! His father was a younger son of the noble Vere, Earl of Oxford, of poetic renown in the days of good Queen Bess, and, as you doubtless remember, a brave and courtly favourite of her most august majesty. He (that is to say, our young fanatic's father) held a benefice for many years not far distant from the fair city of Sarum, where he died some eighteen months since, having already some months earlier lost his beloved wife, the beautiful and saintly Lady Enid, of whose rare devotion to holy things many a pretty tale has been told me by my mother. Her maiden home was near to my own birthplace, and but a stone's-throw from Montgomery Castle, where was born that saintly man, her own infant playmate, and in after years her husband's dearest friend, Master George Herbert, whose late cure of Bemerton, nigh to Sarum, lay at but some few miles distance from the country rectory in which Master Vere laboured for many years. The youth in yon gallery raves continually of this holy and learned man, at whose feet he drank in such inspiration to holiness as may well have fostered in him that saintliness of character at first derived from so good a mother, and for which he is already remarkable. He can repeat Master Herbert's poems, I trow, by the hour together, and is ever throwing them in my face in support of his own wild theories on the subject of strong drink. And he laments his death even now scarcely less sorely than that of his own father--which deaths, by a strange coincidence, took place within some few days of each other in the month of February of this last year,--a fitting mutual unloosing of those earthly bonds which had long knit the two reverend friends in a deep affection."