“I am pleased that they can do it with a good conscience,” observed More. “And now let us talk of other matters. If I would not do it for my daughter’s sake, who begged me, I would not do it for the sake of both the Houses of Parliament, nor even, dear Mr. Torridon, for yours and Master Cromwell’s.” Ralph saw that it was of no use, and began to speak of other things. He gave him news of Chelsea. “They are not very merry there,” he said, “and I hardly suppose you would wish them to be.” “Why not?” cried More, with a beaming face, “I am merry enough. I would not be a monk; so God hath compelled me to be one, and treats me as one of His own spoilt children. He setteth me on His lap and dandleth me. I have never been so happy.” He told Ralph presently that his chief sorrow was that he could not go to mass or receive the sacraments. The Lieutenant, Sir Edward Walsingham, who had been his friend, had told him that he would very gladly have given him liberties of this kind, but that he dared not, for fear of the King’s displeasure. “But I told him,” said More, “not to trouble himself that I liked his cheer well enough as it was, and if ever I did not he was to put me out of his doors.” After a little more talk he showed Ralph what he was writing. It was a treatise called a “Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.” “It is to persuade myself,” he said, “that I am no more a prisoner than I was before; I know I am, but sometimes forget it. We are all God’s prisoners.” Ralph glanced down the page just written and was astonished at its good humour. “Some prisoner of another gaol,” he read, “singeth, danceth in his two fetters, and feareth not his feet for stumbling at a stone; while God’s prisoner, that hath but his one foot fettered by the gout, lieth groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear there would fall on his foot no more than a cushion.” * * * * * Ralph went straight up the river from the Tower to Chelsea to take them news of the prisoner, and was silent and moody as he went. He had been half touched and half enraged by More’s bearing--touched by his simplicity and cheerfulness and enraged by his confidence in a bad cause. Mrs. Alice More behaved as usual when he got there: she had a genius for the obvious; commented on the weariness of living in one room, the distress at the thought that one was fastened in at the will of another; deplored the plainness of the prison fare, and the folly of her husband in refusing an oath that she herself and her children and the vast majority of the prominent persons in England had found so simple in accepting. She left nothing unsaid. Finally, she apologized for the plainness of her dress. “You must think me a slattern, Mr. Torridon, but I cannot help it. I have not the heart nor the means, now that my man is in prison, to do better.” And her solemn eyes filled with tears.