Meanwhile the earl lingered during the space of a year in much suffering of body, but in a peace of mind which was but at rare intervals broken by the memory of the curse upon his house or by its actual influences, from which it seemed that the presence of his loved daughter had a special power to protect him, aided by the holy influences of him whose love for herself and her fallen house grew deeper day by day, and whose one earnest prayer and desire was, that her father might pass away from this world in a peace unknown to his forefathers, free at last from the blight of that horrible curse which his own luckless ancestor had pronounced. Many hours the chaplain spent in reading and prayer with the wounded earl, whose careless, pleasure-loving nature, deepened and softened by the hardships of the battlefield and by his present bed of sickness, drank in new strength and vigour from its constant contrast with one whose daily life was a renewed sacrifice of all life's dearest hopes. And when the old evil gained the mastery, and, like Saul, he was for a time as one possessed with a demon, it was the chaplain with his organ, or Primrose with her harp, who, like David, soothed him and brought him back to reason by their wonderful gift of music; and as the old halls rang with the sweet sound of those harpstrings, his troubled soul grew still, and Percival listened like one entranced to the heavenly strains, and saw visions of the harpers ever "harping with their harps" around the throne of God, and of that white-robed throng who have "come out of great tribulation," in whose pure midst he and Primrose might perchance in the mercy of God one day forget their present sorrows in a mutual service of love and worship which should know no ending.