“If only I had asked Colonel Norton when he had encountered him,” she reflected, miserably, “but in the agony of the moment all I thought of was how to hide everything. He can never have guessed, that is one comfort; and I’ll never, never speak of the matter again should he come here. Yet if only I could know for certain when it was! I will, at any rate, see if Uncle Coke knows.” So, after dinner, when the Vicar was filling his pipe, she asked, with well-assumed indifference, “did Captain Bayly give you much news of Gloucester, sir, the other night? Had he been there in the siege?” “Nay; I gathered that he had only quitted his home at Poole, in Dorsetshire, a short time ago. Governor Massey had persuaded him to come into Herefordshire because he had seen something in Dorset of the movement of the Clubmen, which they say is now spreading to our county.” “What are the Clubmen?” asked Hilary. “They are those country-folk who are determined to have nothing to do either with Royalists or Parliamentarians, but league themselves together to defend their homes and families.” “In truth, then, sir, I think you yourself are one,” said Hilary, smiling. “For you certainly hold aloof from both parties in one sense, and feed the hungry without respect of persons or opinions.” “Child, my first duty is to obey the Prince of Peace,” said the Vicar. “I do not understand the violent warlike spirit of most of our clergy, or the bitter words of the Puritan preachers. But it hath never been my fortune to agree well with parsons; the bulk of them seem to me absorbed in the little interests of their parishes, wrapped up in their own narrow opinions and unmindful of greater things.” Hilary was silent; she wondered what it was that made her uncle so unlike such a parson as Prebendary Rogers, of Stoke Edith, and she tried to understand why he was always at his best when with men of other callings. Much as she loved him, and greatly as she had been influenced by his gentle, kindly spirit, and by the quiet humour which had done so much to cheer her sadness, he was still something of an enigma to her. But she had a suspicion that the true key to his life lay in the old saying, “The liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand.” But a long digression had been made, and she was deter mined to bring back the conversation to the question she had at heart before the Vicar lighted his pipe. “When was Sir William Waller’s army last in Gloucestershire?” she asked.