A mile further on, Mr Marshall was coming home down the same road, in a more despondent mood than was usual with him. Things were going badly for the Puritans abroad, and for the Marshalls at home. An ejected minister was at all times an unfashionable person, and usually a very poor man. His income was small, was growing smaller, and was not at all likely to take a turn and increase. His wife was gone, and he felt her loss rather more than less as time passed on; and Agnes had her private trouble, for her affianced husband, a young tradesman to whom she had been engaged for two years, had jilted her when he heard of her father's ejectment. Altogether, the prospect before the Marshalls was not pleasant. Rent was due, and clothes were needed, and money was exceedingly scanty. In the outside world, too, the sky was dull and gloomy. The Puritans were in no greater favour than they had been, though the Papists were at the lowest ebb. That there was any inconsistency in their conduct did not apparently occur to the authorities, nor that the true way to repress Popery was by cultivating Puritanism. Believing the true principles of the Church of England to be the golden mean between the two, they acted under the pleasing illusion that when both halves were cut off, the middle would be left intact, and all the better for the operation. As Mr Marshall walked on in the Tottenham road, he saw a figure seated on the grassy bank at some distance before him. When he came nearer, he perceived that it was a young man, who sat with his head cast down, in an attitude of meditation, and a light cane in his hand, with which now and then he switched off the head of an unoffending dandelion. Drawing nearer still, the minister began to suspect that the youth's face was not unfamiliar; and when he came close, instead of passing the sitter on the bank, he stepped down, and took a seat beside him. The youth had paid no apparent attention to his companion until that moment. His face was turned away northward, and only when Mr Marshall sat down close to him did he seem to perceive that he was not alone. "How goes the world with you this afternoon, Mr Louvaine?" "Mr Marshall! I ask your pardon. I had not seen you." "I thought not. You have taken a long walk." Aubrey made no reply. "Now, how am I to get at this shut-up heart?" said Mr Marshall to himself. "To say the wrong thing just now may do considerable harm. Yet what is the right one?" Aloud he said only,--"I hope my Lady Lettice is well? I know not whether you or I saw her last." "I have not seen her for months," said Aubrey, curtly. "Then I am happier than you, for I saw her three weeks since. I thought her looking somewhat frail and feeble, even more so than her wont; yet very ripe for Heaven, when as it shall please God to take her." There was no answer again. Aubrey's cane applied itself diligently to making a plantain leaf lie to the right of its neighbour instead of the _left_.