A Bride Of Honor. Ruth Axtell Morren

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      Lindsay sat in their coach as it carried them down St. George’s Row along the northern edge of Hyde Park. Reverend Hathaway’s sermon still echoed in her ears.

      His words had seemed directed at her, exhorting her in a quiet, earnest way to become a true disciple of Christ. Church sermons had never been like this before. Sermons were usually dry, delivered in the elevated tones of a minister who seemed more concerned with his elocution than the text.

      Never had she heard the scriptures in such a personal way, a way that demanded something of her even though she’d always lived according to the church’s laws.

      “What did you think of the Hathaways, my dear?” Beatrice asked.

      Lindsay turned to the older lady, a distant cousin on her mother’s side who had recently come to live with her father to oversee Lindsay’s coming out. “Oh, most genial,” she agreed wholeheartedly, although thinking about it now, she had to admit she’d hardly noticed the reverend’s sister or her betrothed in her admiration for the reverend.

      “Mr. Quinn certainly seemed genial, not at all what I expected.”

      Lindsay remembered the large, dark-haired man’s friendly manner. “Oh?”

      “I meant from all I’d heard about him.”

      “What do you mean?”

      Beatrice’s eyes widened. “Don’t you know? He’s a former convict.”

      Lindsay turned on the seat and stared at her cousin. “A convict?”

      “Haven’t you read the papers? He was awaiting his execution at Newgate when he was rescued by a gang of ruffians. For months he escaped the eyes of the law.” Beatrice shook her head with a chuckle. “It turns out all along he’d been hiding away in a parsonage right here. The magistrates were in an uproar.”

      “You can’t mean he was here…at St. George’s?”

      Her cousin nodded. “The very same.”

      Lindsay looked away from her cousin, her thoughts in a whirl, unable to reconcile the godly man who had delivered such a quietly convicting sermon with a man who would harbor a criminal.

      “He could not have stayed hidden for so long if the reverend and his sister hadn’t helped him,” Beatrice confirmed for her. “And to think, in the course of aiding and abetting him, Miss Hathaway fell in love with him. It is to her he owes the royal pardon he received.”

      “Oh, my,” she breathed, hardly able to grasp it.

      “It was in all the tabloids,” Beatrice continued. “Of course, I’m forgetting you’ve been away at school and have missed the goings-on here in London.”

      “Tell me all the particulars. It sounds wonderfully romantic!”

      By the time Beatrice had finished a story that sounded more incredible than anything in her novels, they’d arrived at Lindsay’s home on Grosvenor Square in the heart of Mayfair.

      Despite the happy ending to the tale, Lindsay found it almost impossible to imagine breaking the law and hiding out from the authorities. “You know, I believe it’s no coincidence Mr. Quinn gave himself up to the authorities. If I had been residing under the Reverend Hathaway’s roof all that time, I, too, would have been convicted of any wrongdoing and made a clean breast of things.”

      “Yes, I imagine the Hathaways must have influenced Mr. Quinn greatly. Reverend Hathaway appears to have a true shepherd’s heart.”