‘No; I will remain where I am until I hear the worst.’

’Or come home with me, where thou wilt hear it yet sooner.  Thou shalt taste a roundhead’s hospitality.’

‘I scorn thee and thy false friendship,’ cried Rowland, and turning again into the closet, he bolted the door.

That same morning a great iron ball struck the marble horse on his proud head, and flung it in fragments over the court.  From his neck the water bubbled up bright and clear, like the life-blood of the wounded whiteness.

‘Poor Molly!’ said the marquis, when he looked from his study-window—­then smiled at his pity.

Lord Charles entered:  a messenger had come from general Fairfax, demanding a surrender in the name of the parliament.

’If they had but gone on a little longer, Charles, they might have saved us the trouble,’ said his lordship, ’for there would have been nothing left to surrender.—­But I will consider the proposal,’ he added.  ’Pray tell sir Thomas that whatever I do, I look first to have it approved of the king.’

But there was no longer the shadow of a question as to submission.  All that was left was but the arrangement of conditions.  The marquis was aware that captain Hooper’s trenches were rapidly approaching the rampart; that six great mortars for throwing shells had been got into position; and that resistance would be the merest folly.

Various meetings, therefore, of commissioners appointed on both sides for the settling of the terms of submission took place; and at last, on the fifteenth of August, they were finally arranged, and the surrender fixed for the seventeenth.

The interval was a sad time.  All day long tears were flowing, the ladies doing their best to conceal, the servants to display them.  Every one was busy gathering together what personal effects might be carried away.  It was especially a sad time for lord Glamorgan’s children, for they were old enough not merely to love the place, but to know that they loved it; and the thought that the sacred things of their home were about to pass into other hands, roused in them wrath and indignation as well as grief; for the sense of property is, in the minds of children who have been born and brought up in the midst of family possessions, perhaps stronger than in the minds of their elders.

As the sun was going down on the evening of the sixteenth, Dorothy, who had been helping now one and now another of the ladies all day long, having, indeed, little of her own to demand her attention, Dick and Marquis being almost her sole valuables, came from the keep, and was crossing the fountain court to her old room on its western side.  Every one was busy indoors, and the place appeared deserted.  There was a stillness in the air that sounded awful.  For so many weeks it had been shattered with roar upon roar, and now the guns had ceased to bellow, leaving a sense of vacancy and doubt, an oppression of silence.  The hum that came from the lines outside seemed but to enhance the stillness within.  But the sunlight lived on sweet and calm, as if all was well.  It seemed to promise that wrath and ruin would pass, and leave no lasting desolation behind them.  Yet she could not help heaving a great sigh, and the tears came streaming down her cheeks.