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And he marched out, priding himself that he had got the better of Harman both in theology and in medicine.

§ 4

A little farther on the road home, it struck him that this was not the right way for a Pastor to feel toward a sick member of his flock. But he could not help it. He could not like Exalted Harman, who, after all, was a Churchman in name only. He had for his own comfort urged his not too difficult conscience to conformity—hence, no doubt, his failure to understand his Vicar's renunciation—but his mind was still full of Anabaptist rubbish and his heart of a secret enmity toward the Church of Laud and Ken and Sancroft, restored and re-established.

The man was a humbug. Gervase had vastly preferred his elder brother Accepted, though he and his family had often cursed him for an arrant, rank, iron-sided Bible thumper, but for whose timely death they would have been kept still longer out of their estates. He had refused to budge from where Cromwell had placed him, and he had thought John Douce a poor washy scoundrel for so readily coming to an agreement and surrendering an ownership for a mere mastership. He would have held Conster against the Philistines another ten years had he lived. But he had died.