"Yes, Mistress Isabel; and I thank God for it. Mr. Barnes will be the proper person. My mother will let him know; and I have no doubt that he will receive you by Easter, and that you can make your First Communion on that day." She bowed her head, wondering a little at his assurance. "You will forgive me, I know, if I seem discourteous," went on the priest, "but I trust you understand the terms on which you come. You come as a little child, to learn; is it not so? Simply that?" She bowed her head again. "Then I need not keep you. If you will kneel, I will give you my blessing." She knelt down at once before him, and he blessed her, lifting his wrenched hand with difficulty and letting it sink quickly down again. By an impulse she could not resist she leaned forward on her knees and took it gently into her two soft hands and kissed it. "Oh! forgive him, Mr. Maxwell; I am sure he did not know." And then her tears poured down. "My child," said his voice tenderly, "in any case I not only forgive him, but I thank him. How could I not? He has brought me love-tokens from my Lord." She kissed his hand again, and stood up; her eyes were blinded with tears; but they were not all for grief. Then Mistress Margaret came in from the inner room, and led the girl out; and the mother came in once more to her son for the ten minutes before he was to leave her. CHAPTER XII A STRIFE OF TONGUES Anthony now settled down rather drearily to the study of religious controversy. The continual contrasts that seemed forced upon him by the rival systems of England and Rome (so far as England might be said to have a coherent system at this time), all tended to show him that there were these two sharply-divided schemes, each claiming to represent Christ's Institution, and each exclusive of the other. Was it of Christ's institution that His Church should be a department of the National Life; and that the civil prince should be its final arbiter and ruler, however little he might interfere in its ordinary administration? This was Elizabeth's idea. Or was the Church, as Mr. Buxton had explained it, a huge unnational Society, dependent, it must of course be, to some extent on local circumstances, but essentially unrestricted by limit of nationality or of racial tendencies? This was the claim of Rome. Of course an immense number of other arguments circled round this--in fact, most of the arguments that are familiar to controversialists at the present day; but the centre of all, to Anthony's mind, as indeed it was to the mind of the civil and religious authorities of the time, was the question of supremacy--Elizabeth or Gregory?