Yet truly he in no way interfered with his daughter, but allowed her her will in the matter, and though Farry screwed more and more into his confidence, yet Mrs. Endicott was unmolested in her devotions. About the year 1678 Mr. Endicott sold his house in Bedford and returned to his farm at Edworth, which was at some distance from the chapel where Mr. Bunyan preached. Yet Mrs. Endicott was nothing daunted by difficulties of road or weather, and attended the meetings as regularly as any grave elder of them all. Now this persistency of hers gave occasion for Gilbert Farry to influence her father’s mind in an evil fashion; it was not in nature, he said, for a woman young and excessively comely (and who had been addicted to gay things) to be so blinded, addicted and possessed by religious zeal as was Grace Endicott. He hinted that John Bunyan was a personable man and one who had not so long been reformed from the most carnal ways of the Devil; he related how the preacher and the maiden held long conversations, going to and from the chapel, and he spread these scandals until they were known to all Bedford. It happened that while things were in this pass, in the winter of this year ’78, Mr. Bunyan was appointed to preach and administer the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper at Gamlingay, which is some distance from Edworth. Mrs. Endicott made her preparations to go, but when it came to asking the consent of her father it was angrily withheld. Whereupon she fell into a great travail of mind and besought him with utter earnestness and piteous entreaties to permit her to attend this meeting, until he weakened before her importunities and gave his consent on the two conditions–that she did her household before she went and that she returned the same night at a godly hour. On the Friday, therefore, Mrs. Endicott, having well looked to all her duties, left her home and went to her brother-in-law’s house, where she was to wait for a Baptist minister who was to escort her to Gamlingay. Here she waited, but the hour became late and the minister did not come; then did Mrs. Endicott implore her relative to lend her a horse, but he had not one which was not at work, save only that on which he and his wife were riding to the meeting themselves. Hearing this, Mrs. Endicott broke into a passion of despair and paced about the apartment in an extremity of anguish, and made such a plaint that even her own sister thought she showed an excess of sorrow. In the midst of this scene Mr. Bunyan himself came riding past, and Mrs. Endicott had him stopped and bid her brother-in law ask if the preacher would take her upon his pillion. And down she came and stood on the doorstep to second this request. “Will you take me, Mr. Bunyan,” she asked, “for my soul’s sake?” And he was mute, for he was both loath and unwilling, for he knew the hard things said of him and her in Bedford town.