The good odour of the bread arose and floated out to mingle with the maytime of the little garden. Old Roger Heron, short, ruddy, and hale for all he was so clerkly, came in from his spading. “That smells finely!” he said. He dipped a cup into the well water and drank. “Aye, and it is going to taste finely!” answered Joan. “‘I have heard talk of bold Robin Hood, And of brave Little John, Of Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet, Locksley and Maid Marian—’” Her father put down the cup, moved to the settle, and sitting deliberately down, began with deliberation one of his talks of a thinking man. “Look you, Joan! Goodman Cole and I have been discoursing. We were talking of religion.” “Aye?” said Joan. She spread a white cloth upon the table and set in the midst a bow-pot of cherry bloom. “Religion. Well?” “You should say the word with a heavier tone,” said old Roger. “‘Religion.’—Things aren’t here as they were at your uncle’s—rest his soul! Modesty in religion and a decent mirth seemed right enough, seeing that the earl was minded that way and on the whole the town as well. So the old games and songs and ways went somehow on—though everything was stiffening, even there, and not like it was when I was young and the learned were talking of the Greeks. But times have changed! It seems the Lord wishes gloom, or the minister says he does. If it was begun to be felt in the castle and the town, and it was,—your uncle and I often talked about it,—it shows ten times more here. Aye, it showed three years ago, but Goodman Cole says it grows day by day, and that now if you appear not with a holy melancholy you are little else than a lost soul!” “‘Holy melancholy’ and ‘lost souls,’” said Joan. “I know not why it is that those words together sound to me so foolish.—Doth it help anything when I am sad?” “‘—Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet, Locksley and Maid Marian—’” “Stop, child!” said old Roger. “I’m in earnest and so must you be. Look you, Joan! you’re all I’ve got, and folk will be fanciful about all they’ve got and try to guard it all around. And it came into my head while Goodman Cole was talking—and it was he who put it there, talking of your looks, and saying that you had better go mim-mouth to church, and that you had a strange way of looking straight at a body when you spoke, which didn’t become a woman, who ought always to go with a downcast look—it came into my head, I say, that we’re poor and without any protector and fairly strange here now, and how evil tongues are as common as grass, and I said to myself that I’d give you a good cautioning—” “Mim-mouth and downcast look and go to heaven so!” said Joan. “I wonder what that heaven’s like!”