Still, quite characteristically, the agents were not forborne, but in proportion as the preparations advanced, became more daring and insistent--but not more trustworthy in their reports. Allen, a polemical Jesuit of Rheims, and the founder of the English College at Douay, was responsible for the despatch to his native land of a number of proselytising scouts, secret emissaries deputed to test popular feeling, and sow wherever they could the seeds of disaffection. They did little, however, but inflame the national obduracy; for by this time the country was determinedly Protestant, and the knowledge of these _agents provocateurs_ let loose in its midst only agitated and angered it. Now and again one, being caught, would pay the penalty of his temerity to the severe enactments passed against his kind; now and again one would fall a victim to popular fury. But still they came, and still misread and misreported--but not always, as the sequel will show, in the pure interests of their mission. There was one, at least, who, whatever his original motive, converted the opportunity given him to some profitable dealing on his own account. But knavish methods will ever attract knavish instruments, and undercut, in all the history of trading, cut undercut. In 1584, a Jesuit, having in his possession a plan for the invasion of England and the destruction of its Queen, was captured at sea. The news roused public indignation to boiling pitch, and led indirectly to an association being formed, with Leicester at its head, to punish with death any attempt upon the royal life, and to exclude from the throne all who should authorize such an attempt, or design in any way to profit by it--another big nail driven into poor Mary’s coffin. Brion heard of this league, and was vaguely troubled--not because of its object, but because of the temper it revealed and fomented, and to which, in some possible local ebullition of itself, he dreaded his Uncle might come to fall a victim. He knew that the neighbourhood had long looked darkly askance upon the ex-judge as a backslider and idolater, who practised, in secret, rites which might bring him to the stake if avowed. He knew--but he knew also what rumour did not; that it was a ruined and dethroned intellect which had reverted to its ancient creed, not from re-established conviction, but from simple loss of memory. To senility early impressions are the most remembered things; and for Quentin Bagott--though senile only in the sense of one beggared by his habits of life’s best maturity--the years of his conversion were become a vague shadow, full of strange terrors and menacing shapes. His conspiring was a myth; he had no power of will or mind left in him to plot a sparrow’s downfall. Any sympathy he might appear to show with designs subversive to the State was the mere chuckling echo of long-forgotten moods, when his own dark destiny had wrought in him the passions of a rebel. Yet all this, though true