"And I shall never see them!" he thought. "So near the Waldensian valleys:--what a stronghold of heresy they must be! Ah, well! I can say every day a mass with an intention for my parents. Who knows if God may be merciful to them, after all? The soul is worth more than the body, and eternal happiness is worth more than any amount of ease or felicity in this world. From what a fate, therefore, have I been rescued! I ought to be very thankful." But gratitude and love are the last things into which a man can scold himself, and Stevens did not feel so thankful as he thought he ought to be. He might have been more so, had he known that Father Boniface had not troubled himself to tell him the exact truth. It was from the outermost village of the Val Martino, in the Waldensian valleys, not from Auvergne, that he had been stolen away. And in that Val Martino, though he was never to know it, every night knelt Lucetta Carmagnoli, mourning before God--less for the martyred husband, or for the two brave young sons slain in battle, than for the lost first-born, whose fate she could guess only too well. Wavering from hour to hour between the passion of hope--"Oh that Ishmael might live before Thee!"[8]--and the passion of despair--"Would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son!"[9] Such prayers and tears seem lost sometimes. But "are they not in Thy book?"[10] "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter."[11] It is not only Simon the son of Jonas who is asked, now in the tempest, now in the still, small voice, "Lovest thou Me more than these?"[12] Stevens rose from his green couch, and walked back to London. His heart had been dormant all his life till now, and it went easily to sleep again. His conscience the Jesuits had crushed and twisted and trained so early that it never troubled him with a single pang. By the time that he had reached Fleet Street, and had solaced his inner man with a second dish of coffee (and something in it) at the Tory coffee-house, Mr. Cuthbert Stevens was himself again. And if he did look back on the hour spent in the fields at Clerkenwell, it was only to reflect with momentary annoyance that, as he would have phrased it, he had made a fool of himself. And it was very rarely indeed that he thought that substantive applicable in the slightest degree to the Rev. Cuthbert Stevens. "Well, there is one comfort," he meditated, as he sat imbibing the mixture: "nobody saw me do it."