[Sidenote: The Merry Monarch.] How far this was true can, perhaps, never be fairly determined. The king's pleasures always interested him vastly more than religious questions of any kind, and the fears of those who dreaded to see England fall back under popish rule were probably exaggerated. It is very certain that these ideas were fed by dangerous men, who for their own selfish ends spread alarms of popish plots and conspiracies which existed nowhere but in their own mischievous brains; and many harmless peace-abiding Roman Catholics were hunted to prison and death, solely for the crime of being faithful to the creed they had been reared in. These did not, however, remain entirely unavenged, for the love of fair play and of justice triumphed in the end; and the wretches who had persecuted their fellow-men under the pretence of religion were many of them severely punished, and few pitied them. The father of Lawrence Lee had died, fighting for King Charles the First on Worcester field; while Richard Rumbold had lost his eye in the selfsame struggle, serving the Parliamentary forces. [Sidenote: A dark desire.] Rumbold hated the Stuart race; and when he used to hear Madam Lee teaching her little Lawrence to flourish his chubby hands and cry, "God save the king!" an ugly sneer would begin to gather about his lips, though he would hold them fast shut, for the Nether Hall folks were prosperous and well-to-do; and the maltster, if he could avoid it, never quarrelled with money. It was, besides, no easy matter to pick a dispute with this young Lee, who troubled his head so vastly little about the affairs of the nation, and whose whole mind was taken up in the management of his farm. As to his heart, it was divided between his mother and his old playmate and constant friend Ruth; and though Ruth's play-days were fast ebbing away, and the old games were now frowned upon by her as silly and rompish, Lawrence cared for her every whit as much as ever; and Rumbold perceiving this, thought he saw in it a turn for the serving of his own purposes. And when one day, about the time of this story's opening, the maltster being in one of his gloomier moods, which, indeed, had grown so strangely frequent that he was rarely out of them, chanced to launch forth into one of his tirades against the king and his government, and said that "sooner than see daughter of his, wife of a man who loved a Stuart, be that Stuart Charles or James, or Tom, Dick, or Hal, he would see her in her coffin." [Sidenote: An angry altercation.] "Love!" replied Lee, turning a little pale as the maltster spoke, "is a strong word, Master Rumbold." "Your father loved the first Charles Stuart," said Rumbold with knitted brows. "Ay, to the death!" sighed the young man; "but I'll warrant 'tis little enough his present majesty remembers that."