No man had any speech with which to answer him, and the little assembly broke up with the usual courtesies. Only Lambert said as he was leaving: "'He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.'"
When they had all gone His Highness went to the table where they had been sitting, and sat down in his great chair of honour and dropped his head on his breast.
Many and great thoughts oppressed him; the melancholy that was such a close companion to his enthusiasms overcame him. He saw himself old, weary, faced with an impossible situation, with unsurmountable difficulties.
For some while he sat so, his head sinking lower, his hands clasped on his knees; then he was aroused by the gentle opening of the door, and Elisabeth Claypole came softly into the Council Chamber.
"Forgive me," she said. "I did see that the others had gone, and, knowing that you must be alone, I feared you had fallen into sad thoughts." She approached him. "It is not well, my father—nay, it is not well—that you should sit alone with melancholy thoughts."
She sank into the chair that the stern Lambert had just left; the dark wood and leather now framed a very different picture from that the austere soldier had made.
Long ill-health, which physicians could not cure, and intervals of lingering illness, which physicians could not ease, had robbed Elisabeth Claypole of much of her vivacity and much of her fresh comeliness, but she still remained, despite her languor, her paleness, a certain sadness caused by constant pain, a creature choice and rare, and, despite all, cheerful and courageous. As the Lord-Protector lifted his tired eyes to gaze at her dear face he saw in her youthful features a sudden startling likeness to his mother, who had died, still valiant and serene, a few months after she had moved into the King's palace.
This curious resemblance between one dead, so full of years, and one young and living gave him a feeling of horrid presage; he rose abruptly.
"Betty, I wish you would get well," he said.
She smiled faintly.