Bertrand, the peasant, who had abandoned the old faith and followed his feudal lord into the new, but who had never imbibed the spirituality of the reform; who had cast aside the bondage of Rome, but who had not yet bowed his head to the yoke of the gentle Jesus; felt that night as he had never done before, and his aroused feelings were never quieted until he came, with no priestly mediator between, to the feet of his Saviour, and found peace in believing. Nor was the impression lessened when Sir John poured forth a simple, earnest prayer to their great Protector. There was no word of complaint in it, still less of anger toward their persecutors. He besought, with earnest pleadings, that as they were now Sauls in persecuting, they might become Pauls in defending the faith. And when the thought of his ruined home and desolate possessions came across his mind, he prayed that those mansions might be bestowed upon his enemies as well as himself, which are not made with hands, and whose treasures no moth nor rust can corrupt, no foe break through and steal. Then they laid them down and slept, calmly and peacefully, for so did they realize God’s presence, that the rough stone walls seemed to them like the fingers of his almighty hand, stretched around them to guard them from their foes. *CHAPTER XI.* _*The Lesson of Forgiveness.*_ When Charles Bertrand--for he it was who was their stranger guest--had further narrated how, the next day, the two Lollards had easily passed over the few miles that lay between their night’s resting-place and Cobham’s mountain retreat in that wild country which gave asylum to outlaws of every kind, he told them that Sir John still had his habitation in Wales, but frequently ventured down into the valleys of his own land, traversing several counties under various disguises, to attend and encourage meetings of the Reformers. Patiently they were all waiting for the time when, bursting over the land as the sunbeams after a thunder-cloud has passed, Bible truth, liberty, and toleration should make themselves to be known and acknowledged by the world. Patiently and trustingly they waited, for they had no doubt of the fulfillment of their Master’s promises; but, alas! it pleased that Master, whose will must be unquestioned by human intellect, long, very long to delay the deliverance which was yet surely to come. The child that was then at its mother’s breast grew up to boyhood, manhood, descended to old age, and then returned to his native dust, long ere that day came which those fond, simple hearts believed to be even then at the dawn. The nation was not yet sufficiently purged, men’s faith not sufficiently tried; that precious "seed of the church," the blood of holy martyrs, had not yet finished dropping into the earth, nor had it yet been sufficiently watered by widows’ and orphans’ tears for the precious harvest to spring