eyes, looking up at him with the adoring compassion of a child prone to
hero-worship--thinking of him already as saint and martyr--whose martyrdom
was not yet consummated in blood.

King Charles had presented his faithful servant, Sir John Kirkland, with a
half-length replica of one of his Vandyke portraits, a beautiful head, with
a strange inward look--that look of isolation and aloofness which we who
know his story take for a prophecy of doom--which the sculptor Bernini had
remarked, when he modelled the royal head for marble. The picture hung in
the place of honour in the long narrow gallery at the Manor Moat, with
trophies of Flodden and Zutphen arranged against the blackened oak
panelling above it. The Kirklands had been a race of soldiers since the
days of Edward III. The house was full of war-like decorations--tattered
colours, old armour, memorials of fighting Kirklands who had long been
dust.

There came an evil day when the rabble rout of Cromwell's crop-haired
soldiery burst into the manor house to pillage and destroy, carrying off
curios and relics that were the gradual accumulation of a century and a
half of peaceful occupation.

The old Dowager's grey hairs had barely saved her from outrage on that
bitter day. It was only her utter helplessness and afflicted condition that
prevailed upon the Parliamentary captain, and prevented him from carrying
out his design, which was to haul her off to one of those London prisons at
that time so gorged with Royalist captives that the devilish ingenuity of
the Parliament had devised floating gaols on the Thames, where persons of
quality and character were herded together below decks, to the loss of
health, and even of life.