I have said above of this early friendship between a lad of eleven and a maid not half that age, that it endured five years. For at the end of that period the comradeship indeed was broken, and a term was set to the habit of community in all things that was to me at least so comfortable. The day that took my companion to reside in the town of Sherborne, there to attend the King's School, brought on my small mind its first remembered sorrow; wherefore I wept greatly, and would not for many days be comforted. At the time I did not understand (as how should I, being but ten years of age?) the reasons of this so sudden change in his mother's intention. But I have since learned that two causes, of which I myself, poor maid, was one, determined the Lady Mary Royston to take her son from the hands of the learned and pious governor who should have led him in the path of learning and conduct even up to the gates of the University of Oxford. Thus her late husband had intended, but, the tutor growing lazy and overeasy perhaps, while Ned would ever more frequently take the bit of control fast between the teeth of stubbornness, she was minded to subject him to sterner authority. She was moved, moreover, like many another parent of an only son, by some measure of jealousy, directed, in her case, toward "the wild little maid of Drayton," as she would call me; for, with all his duty to his mother, no words or wishes of hers could shake that notable and constant affection that Ned did then, as ever, spend upon me. Knowing, too, by her late husband, of the papistical bias (as she would say) of the Drayton family more than others of those parts had learned, she was ever in dread (pursuing Mr. Nathaniel Royston's policy of caution) lest our acquaintance should lead her or her son into some seeming of complicity with traitors. For we were then in the year 1678 and the full tide of the Popish Plot. But I have always believed that I was far more in this matter of sending Ned to Sherborne than Dr. Titus Gates or the whole College of Cardinals. By this and by that, certain it is that go to Sherborne he did, and that my days had been from that hour very cheerless but for a notable addition to our family, bringing some measure of solace to a mighty sore little heart. When he heard that Ned was gone, and that the tutor knew not where to turn himself for a living after his dismission by the Lady Mary, my good father mounted his horse and rode over to Royston, leaving me marvelling greatly at the courage and hardihood of a man that dared encounter a woman so formidable as I then held Ned's mother to be. For only twice had I been with him to Royston Chase, and the second time even happier to be gone than the first. So it was that I deemed my father a very St. George that could face cheerfully this dragon.