"If she were questioned, she might not be able to help answering," replied the shepherd. "Such minds and consciences as hers are as wax in the hands of a confessor like Father Barnaby. Many a time hath the brother betrayed the brother to death, and the father the son, without thinking they were doing any harm, or that their confession would be used against them. However, all may yet be well, and we will not borrow trouble. 'Each day's trouble is sufficient for the same selfe day,' our Gospel tells us. You have gotten the right side of Sir John, and that is something." "I cannot help liking the poor man, in spite of his laziness and love of eating," said Jack. "He seems so good-natured, and he was so anxious that I should get on well with Father Barnaby, who by the way treated him with scant civility. I thought he might reverence the old man's age at any rate, for Sir John is old enough to be Father Barnaby's father. I wonder what in the world brought him up there behind the thornbush the other day." "Not his own good will, I dare say," replied the shepherd. "I should not care if he had been the only listener, but I shrewdly suspect that sacristan of his has been before him. He is a sharp fellow, that same sacristan, and I have heard he was placed here by Father Barnaby to keep a lookout upon matters in the parish. It has been whispered—take good heed you whisper it not again—that our good knight is a favorer of the Gospel, like his father and grandfather before him; and I suspect Father Barnaby may have put this Brother Jacob about Sir John as a spy not only on him, but upon the family at the Hall. He had better not let our knight catch him at any spy work!" added the old man, smiling somewhat grimly, "Or he will get a worse fall than poor Father John's." For two or three weeks all went on quietly with our friends at Holford. Mindful of another probable encounter with Father Barnaby, Jack studied his Horace with diligence, and stored his mind with hosts of queries to be answered and difficulties to be solved, should he meet the father again. He was a good deal startled and shocked by some things he encountered in his studies, and could not but wonder how two churchmen like Father Barnaby and Father Thomas of Glastonbury could bestow so much time and thought upon ladies of such at the least dubious character as some of those celebrated by their favorite author.