Many a night of sleepless watch and prayer did the Lady Shanno keep during the long dreary months of that sad winter, and none but God knew the struggle it cost her to bear unmurmuringly that bitter separation from him whose presence was her very life, and whose absence might now, in one short moment, amid the rage of battle, be turned into the absence of death. One moment and Rhiwallon's fierce black eyes had been closed in their last sleep, and their penetrating vision had pierced into the mystic land beyond the grave. His gallant, stalwart form in one moment had been stretched motionless upon the blood-stained earth. What chance bullet might not suddenly strike Percival's breast, and lay him too, stiff and cold, upon the ground? It was strange, the girl often mused in her tortured anxiety, how little, with all her love for her father and Rhiwallon, she had reckoned upon any one of those stray bullets hurting them; yet now her imagination saw at every moment of the day each bullet fired from every gun of the enemy to be whizzing through the air with deadly aim at that one breast, which was Percival's, and every sword bared but to strike at his brave heart! Yet Rhiwallon had already fallen, and the chaplain laboured on unhurt at his ministrations to the sick and dying, and in his brave support of the earl against that deadly weakness ever ready to ensnare him in its toils; while Primrose prayed day by day within her castle walls for strength to make her sacrifice of her friend more willingly, to offer him, if need be, even to death upon the battlefield for her father's sake--yet every day feeling his image to grow in absence ever dearer to her heart.