During the months of September and October of that same year we lived in great horror and dread of my Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, whose terrible circuit, I thank God, it does not fall to me even in part to describe. For this storm passed us in Drayton and Royston safely by, though we both saw and heard, as it were, the flash of its lightning and roll of its thunder. The doings, however, of that wicked and shameless man, so terribly disgracing his high office and that of him from whom he derived it, seemed to hold a ghastly and irresistible attraction for my father. Every report, printed, written, or spoken, that he could come at he devoured. The concern he showed in all this cruel travesty of justice began with the report that reached him in September of the trial and execution in Winchester of the Lady Alice Lisle--a case too well known to need my telling, except in so far as it affected Sir Michael. John Lisle, a man high in the military service of the Protector Cromwell, had once done great kindness to my father, who had come to know both him and his wife, and to regard them with an affection saddened only by the part the husband had adopted in the affairs of the nation. The news of what he called her murder moved him profoundly, and he pursued the Chief Justice in his mind, as it were, throughout his Bloody Assize, as one who waits to see a bolt fall from Heaven on a malefactor beyond the reach of justice merely human. Of that martyred lady I heard him one day speak in accents of deep sorrow to Madam Royston, who, though going with him heartily in abhorrence of the crime done in the name of justice, took quick exception to the title commonly bestowed on Mistress Lisle. "For I do marvel, dear Sir Michael," she said, "that you, being of such principles as you are, should make use of a title bestowed by Cromwell in blasphemous parody of that ennobling power which on earth is granted to the Lord's Anointed alone." "If God ever sent a lady on this sinful earth," said the old man, with a kind of holy exaltation in his countenance, "Alice Lisle was she. And by this, Lady Mary, she bears higher title and brighter crown than the highest of her murderers. And I pray that the fate of Gomorrah may not fall on the land where such things are done." And Lady Mary, perceiving well who was intended by that word _murderer_, dared not reply, but marvelled much afterwards, as I knew by words she would from time to time let fall, whither my father's musings were leading him. Which was, indeed, but to the same goal to which the tide of events was leading us all.