"Amen," said Thomas Harrison.
And so they parted.
The Lord-Protector stood lonely in the rich chamber, which had been furnished by the dead King and the banished Queen.
He went to the window and looked on the spring fairness of the garden, on the warm glitter of the river and the sails going down to the sea.
His greatness oppressed him in that moment, and he was home-sick for the past and the uneventful days of his youth.
CHAPTER VII
LADY NEWCASTLE
Through the mingled splendour and distress, brightness and confusion of these years of the Lord-Protector's ruling in England, while the glory of England rose to a perilous height (her renown glittered as the foam on a wave cast for a moment into the sun—soon to fall into the darkness of the waters again and to be lost), while Oliver Cromwell shone refulgent in all men's eyes, the Lady Elisabeth Claypole, moving from her husband's house to her father's palaces, and in all places greatly loved, faded visibly and pitifully.
She had always been an advocate of mercy, and many a Cavalier owed his life or his estate to her pleadings, and there was no one, however he might hate Cromwell, who had not a gentle thought for this daughter of his. Among her keen, delicate sisters she showed yet more keen and delicate, and though she had now lost the fresh English fairness which bloomed in the Lady Mary and the Lady Frances, and which had become womanly grace in Bridget Fleetwood, yet of all of them she was the most lovable. If any wished a favour from the Lord-Protector it was to her they went to ask her intercession, for as her illness and her weakness grew and her end came nearer, nearer with every painful breath she drew, His Highness' tender love increased into an agony of yearning, until it seemed as if he could refuse her nothing.