“He sees beyond the struggle and lives in another atmosphere,” thought the girl, all her hardness melting as she looked at the saintly old face. Then, quickening her steps, she hastened on to overtake the doctor before he mounted, not pausing to think what words she should say, but with an eager desire to undo the effect of her needlessly cold message. “Where is Dr. Harford?” she asked, encountering one of the servants. “He would not stay for food, mistress,” replied the man. “I saw him mount his horse but now.” With an impatient exclamation, Hilary ran through the hall and out into the drive; surely she should be in time to stop him, it could not be too late. But the doctor, less calm inwardly than he had appeared to her, had set spurs to his steed and was already out of sight, though she could hear the sound of horse hoofs in the distance. They seemed to her fancy to beat out the words she had sent back to Gabriel, those words which were after all not wholly true. Choking back a sob, she tried to turn her thoughts to Dr. Roger’s harangue on the Divine right of kings. It was but cold comfort. CHAPTER IX. “There is no time so miserable but a man may be true.” --Timon of Athens. How Gabriel lived through the next few days he never clearly remembered. Afterwards it seemed to him as if he had been struggling up some huge mountain, crawling inch by inch with no very definite aim, but simply because he thought it would be the part of a coward to lie down and die. He rode with his father, he went fishing, he read Burton’s “Protestation Protested,” and tried to grasp the tolerant notion of a National Church surrounded by voluntary Churches which had occurred to Dr. Laud’s victim during his long imprisonment. He read, too, Lord Brooke’s “Discourse on Episcopacy,” and got a further glimpse of that toleration which was as yet so little understood by either side in the great struggle. But, through all, the grievous wound in his heart made itself constantly felt, and the dreary emptiness of the world seemed to offer him no grain of comfort. One night he remembered that the life, which seemed so unbearable as well as so useless, might at least be laid down for the country. Hilary had rejected him, but was not the Lord General at Worcester, and only too glad to accept any able-bodied man who would volunteer? It was well known that the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, Hampden, Cromwell--all the leading Parliamentarians, in fact--were profiting by the first repulse at Powick Bridge, and were straining every nerve to get soldiers of a spirit that would control such panic as had disorganised the men when they had unexpectedly encountered Prince Rupert. Gabriel was alone in his father’s study when this thought first came to him. The evening had closed in; his mother, weary with a long day’s work, had retired early, and the doctor had been summoned to see a dying man in St. Owen’s street.