Her father was away in London, and on the seat beside her lay a letter she had that day received from him. He had written full of uneasiness at the political and religious situation. Recently the Earl of Bath had been down in the West of England with new charters to towns in Devon and Cornwall, constituting new electoral bodies, or altering the former bodies, and a hurried election had ensued, in which great pressure had been used to obtain the return of the Court party, of Catholics and Tories, by intimidation on the one side and by bribery on the other. Mr. Crymes, however, supported by the authority of the Earl of Bedford, had been returned for Tavistock in the Protestant interest, and he was now in London, sitting in the first Parliament summoned by James II. Titus Oates, whom the Protestants, or at all events the more ignorant and prejudiced among them, believed in as a faithful witness, had been whipped from Aldgate to Newgate one day, and two days after, again from Newgate to Tyburn, for having revealed the Popish Plot, which was declared to be a fabrication of his own imagination. He and Dangerfield, another of these witnesses, had been pilloried. The King meditated the repeal of the Habeas Corpus and the forcible introduction of the Roman Catholic religion. It was rumoured that there was a rising in Scotland, headed by the Duke of Argyle; there was a great uneasiness in London, and a disturbance of spirits throughout the country. Though the Members of Parliament had been elected in a questionable manner, so as to bring together an undue preponderance of creatures of the Court; yet it had not proved itself as submissive as the King expected. The letter concluded with the words:--"How this will all end, God knows. For myself, I doubt whether there will not be great troubles again even as there were in the times of His Sacred Majesty King Charles I. For mine own part, I would resist even unto blood, rather than see our religion set at naught, and our liberties trampled under foot by Jesuits; and my daily prayer is that the Lord will avert such things from us, and yet with such extravagance and determination do things appear to be pressed forward with this end, that I have not hope myself of a peaceable issue." Had Mr. Crymes been then beside his daughter, he might have supposed that the sad political outlook had disturbed her mind, and had brought the tears to her eyes and the flush to her cheeks; but she had read his letter with indifference. His gloomy forecasts had hardly affected her at all, for her heart was filled with its own peculiar bitterness.