"That is more than I can say, but if it does it will lay a knife to every Protestant throat in Holland—that am I as sure of as of mine own life." But I must not make my story too long. Walter did wait, and did think, but his mind was made up from the first, and the first of May saw us packed up and ready to go on board a Dutch vessel trading to Bristol. 'Twas a hard parting, and the more that I had to leave my little Kate behind, her mother not being willing to trust her so far from her own home. I did not blame her, for I knew I should have felt just so in her place, but yet 'twas like parting with a hand to leave the dear child behind. We took our old English maid, Mary Thornton, with us, and I had just seen my good Anneke settled in her husband's farmhouse in such comfort as I would I could see any where here. (I suppose the great farm, with all its crops and barns, its warm house and beautiful pictures, is all under water now.) I will not linger on the parting. Be it enough to say that we reached Bristol after a somewhat tedious, but very safe voyage, that we had a rough journey from thence to Biddeford, in a dirty little coaster, and at last, a month after leaving home, found ourselves at our own house in the little village or hamlet of Coombe Ashton. [Illustration] CHAPTER XV. COOMBE ASHTON. THE vicarage of Coombe Ashton is just beside the gray old church, so that its garden and orchard, and the churchyard run together without any divisions, save a bank overrun with sweetbrier and ivy. 'Tis a stone house of two floors and three or four gables, convenient and roomy enough, but plain and unornamented as any farmhouse. I shall never forget how forlorn and wretched it looked to my eyes the first time I entered its doors. My husband had left his cure in the hands of Sir David Dean, a good and religious priest, but one as absentminded and indifferent to his own comfort as any man I ever saw. He had lived alone in the vicarage all these years without a housekeeper, save that an old woman, living in one of the alms-cottages by the church-gate, now and then came in and scratched about a bit like a hen in a straw-yard. Any one who knows what men are when left to themselves, may guess what condition matters were in after seven or eight years of such housekeeping. The rushes on the floor must have been at least three months old, and showed such a state of things when we swept them out, that Mary Thornton sat down on the doorstep and cried. "Come, come, Mary; this will never do," said I, though I could have cried myself, easily enough. "Think if Madame Bogardus should come in and find us in all this mess."