It was a treatise called a "Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation." "It is to persuade myself," he said, "that I am no more a prisoner than I was before; I know I am, but sometimes forget it.

We are all God's prisoners." Ralph glanced down the page just written and was astonished at its good humour.
"Some prisoner of another gaol," he read, "singeth, danceth in his two fetters, and feareth not his feet for stumbling at a stone; while God's prisoner, that hath but his one foot fettered by the gout, lieth groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear there would fall on his foot no more than a cushion." * * * * * Ralph went straight up the river from the Tower to Chelsea to take them news of the prisoner, and was silent and moody as he went.

He had been half touched and half enraged by More's bearing--touched by his simplicity and cheerfulness and enraged by his confidence in a bad cause.
Mrs.Alice More behaved as usual when he got there: she had a genius for the obvious; commented on the weariness of living in one room, the distress at the thought that one was fastened in at the will of another; deplored the plainness of the prison fare, and the folly of her husband in refusing an oath that she herself and her children and the vast majority of the prominent persons in England had found so simple in accepting.

She left nothing unsaid.
Finally, she apologized for the plainness of her dress.
"You must think me a slattern, Mr.Torridon, but I cannot help it.

I have not the heart nor the means, now that my man is in prison, to do better." And her solemn eyes filled with tears.
When he had given the news to the family he went aside from the group in the garden to where Beatrice Atherton was sitting below the Jesu tree, with work on her lap.
He had noticed as he talked that she was sitting there, and had raised his voice for her benefit.