But the gloom of the marquis seemed to have vanished with the breaking of the storm, as the outburst of the lightning takes the weight off head and heart that has for days been gathering.  True, when his house began to fall, he would look for a moment grave at each successive rumble, but the next he would smile and nod his head, as if all was just as he had expected and would have it.  One day when sir Toby Mathews and Dr. Bayly happened both to be with him in his study, an ancient stack of chimneys tumbled with tremendous uproar into the stone court.  The two clergymen started visibly, and then looked at each other with pallid faces.  But the marquis smiled, kept the silence for an instant, and then, in slow solemn voice, said: 

’Scimus enim quoniam si terrestris domus nomus nostra hujus habitationis dissolvatur, quod aedificationem ex Deo habemus, domum non manufactam, aeternam in coelis.’

The clergymen grasped each other by the hand, then turning bowed together to the marquis, but the conversation was not resumed.

One evening in the drawing-room, after supper, the marquis, in good spirits, and for him in good health, was talking more merrily than usual.  Lady Glamorgan stood near him in the window.  The captain of the garrison was giving a spirited description of a sally they had made the night before upon colonel Morgan in his quarters at Llandenny, and sir Rowland was vowing that come of it what might, leave or no leave, he would ride the next time, when crash went something in the room, the marquis put his hand to his head, and the countess fled in terror, crying, ‘O Lord!  O Lord!’ A bullet had come through the window, knocked a little marble pillar belonging to it in fragments on the floor, and glancing from it, struck the marquis on the side of the head.  The countess, finding herself unhurt, ran no farther than the door.

‘I ask your pardon, my lord, for my rudeness,’ she said, with trembling voice, as she came slowly back.  ‘But indeed, ladies,’ she added, ’I thought the house was coming down.—­You gentlemen, who know not what fear is, I pray you to forgive me, for I was mortally frightened.’

’Daughter, you had reason to run away, when your father was knocked on the head,’ said the marquis.

He put his finger on the flattened bullet where it had fallen on the table, and turning it round and round, was silent for a moment evidently framing aright something he wanted to say.  Then with the pretence that the bullet had been flattened upon his head,

‘Gentlemen,’ he remarked, ’those who had a mind to flatter me were wont to tell me that I had a good head in my younger days, but if I don’t flatter myself, I think I have a good head-piece in my old age, or else it would not have been musket-proof.’

But although he took the thing thus quietly and indeed merrily, it revealed to him that their usual apartments were no longer fit for the ladies, and he gave orders therefore that the great rooms in the tower should be prepared for them and the children.