He recalled the sudden fierce grip of Catesby's hand upon his arm before he recognized the face of the stranger within their midst.

He recollected the threats he had striven to speak binding him to the silence he was so willing to promise.
What did it all mean?
what could it mean?
Lying in the dark, and turning the matter over and over in his mind, Cuthbert began to feel some fearful and sinister suspicions.
The month when all this had happened had been early in the year; was it January, or early February?
He could scarce remember, but he knew it was one or the other.

And had not his uncle said that Parliament was to have met in February?
Now that it was about to meet soon again, had not Anthony spoken words implying that some muster of friends was looked for in London; and had not Anthony and his son always regarded him in the light of a friend and ally?
Cuthbert was by this time aware that he had but little love left for the creed in which he had been reared.

It seemed to him that all, or at any rate far the greater part, of what was precious in that creed was equally open to him in the Church established in the land, together with the liberty to read the Scriptures for himself, and to exercise his own freedom of conscience as no priest of the Romish Church would ever let him exercise it.

With him there had been no wild revulsion of feeling, no sense of tearing and rending away from one faith to join himself to another.