t it should be granted without
question; whereon quoth my Lord Francis, "I will not die with any suit
in my mouth, save to the King of kings." On this, and on the story of
the Locket, and of his first becoming acquainted with Arabella, of his
sprightly disguise as a Teacher, with the young squire at Madam
Desaguilier's school at Hackney, of his Beauty and Virtues and fine
manners and extraordinary proficiency in Arts and Letters and the
Exercises of Chivalry,--of these and a thousand kindred things the two
women were never tired of talking. And, indeed, if one calls to mind
what vast Eloquence and wealth of words two loving hearts can distil
from a Bit of Ribbon or a Torn Letter, it is not to be wondered at that
Arabella and Ruth should find their Theme inexhaustible--so good and
brave as had been its Object, now dead and cold in the bloody trench at
Hampton yonder, and convert it into a perpetually welling spring of
Mournful Remembrances.

Arabella had taken to her old trick of Painting again, and in the first
and second year of her removal to the Castle executed some very
creditable performances. But she never attempted either the effigies of
her Lover or of the Protector, and confined herself to portraitures of
the late martyred King, and of the Princes now unjustly kept from their
inheritance.

It was during the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell (that mere
puppet-play of Power) that the watch kept on the prisoners in the King's
Castle grew for a time much less severe and even lax. Arabella was
suffered to go out of her chamber, even at the very hours that the
Prisoner above was wandering to and fro. The guards did not hinder their
meeting; and, says Colonel Ferdinando Glover, one day to his daughter,
"I should not wonder if, some of these days, Orders were to come down
for me to set both my birds free from their cage. That which Mrs.
Greenville has done, you and I know full well, and I am almost sorry
that she did not succeed."

"Oh, father!" cries Mistress Ruth, who was of a very soft and tender
nature, and abhorred the very idea of bloodshed; so that, loving
Arabella as she did with all her heart, she could not help regarding her
with a kind of Terror when she remembered the deed for which she was
confined.

"Tush, girl," the Colonel makes answer, "'tis no Treason now to name
such a thing. Oliver's dead, and will eat no more bread; and I misliked
him much at the end, for it is certain that he betrayed the Good