"Peace! peace!" muttered her husband. "He wanted peace!"
"And you?" she ventured timidly.
"I!" he answered. "I live in Meshech and Kedar. I am in blackness and in the waste places; but the Lord hath had exceeding mercy upon me—I have seen light in His Light—therefore am I confident in the hope I may serve Him. His will be done!"
Elisabeth Cromwell looked out at the dim white towers of the cathedral, where her first husband and her first-born lay buried, and she thought of that other child, Robert, who had died at school only three years before. Life seemed to her suddenly unreal. She closed the door and turned away.
Her husband followed her into the room on the right of the passage, where a fair group of children, Mary, Frances, and Elisabeth, were roasting chestnuts by the fire.
A maid was putting a white cloth on the table; the pleasant clink of glasses and china mingled with the laughter and talk of Elisabeth, a beautiful child of some thirteen years, whose grace and gaiety was a sudden brightness in the Puritan household.
At her father's entrance she came to him at once and showed him a round ball she had made of holly berries and hung by a red ribbon as an ornament to her wrist.
"Vanity!" said Colonel Cromwell; but as he kissed her his whole face was radiant with love.