"'_You_ will comfort her, Lettice,' he said, with that quiet commanding way he has sometimes. 'God gives it you to do; and He will give you to do it.' "And as he ceased speaking, and I went back to my Mother, I felt as if there were indeed a strength through which I could do anything that had to be done. "_July_ 1.--Sir Launcelot Trevor has come with tidings of my Father and my brothers. "They are in the West, save the two younger, who went across the Borders after the battle of Marston Moor, and have joined Montrose in the Scottish Highlands, deeming that the king's cause will best rally there. "The good cause is low; lower than ever before. Soon after that fatal day at Naseby the town of Bridgewater surrendered to General Fairfax. "Prince Rupert (with such courage as one might expect, I think, from a chief of plunderers) thereon counselled the king to make peace. But His Majesty, never so majestic as in adversity, said, 'That although, as a soldier and a statesman, he saw no prospect but of ruin, yet, as a Christian, he knew God would never forsake his cause, and suffer rebels to prosper; that he knew his obligations to be, both in conscience and honour, neither to abandon God's cause, to injure his successors, or forsake his friends. Nevertheless, for himself (he said) he looked for nothing but to die with honour and a good conscience; and to his friends he had little prospect to offer, but to die in a good cause, or, what was worse, to live as miserable in maintaining it as the violence of insulting rebels could make them.' "What promises, or royal orders, could bind men, with any soul in them, to their sovereign as words like these? Least of all those who, like us, are bound to the cause by having given up our best for it. Nothing, my Mother says, makes a thing so precious to us as what we suffer for it. Indeed, nothing now seems able to kindle her to anything like life, save aught associated with that sacred cause for which Harry died. "Sir Launcelot saith, moreover, that the rebels have been base enough to lay bare to the eyes of the common people of London the private letters from His Majesty to the queen, found in his cabinet on the field at Naseby. And that these letters contain things which have even lost the king some old loyal friends. Sorry friendship, indeed, or loyalty, to be moved by discoveries, made only through treachery and breach of confidence, which no gentleman would practice to save his life. "But there is one thing Sir Launcelot hinted to me which I dare not breathe to my Mother. He said there was reason enough why Roger was near Harry when he fell; for it was by the hand of one of the Ironsides, beyond doubt, that he died. "But never by Roger's hand! Or, if possibly such a curse could have been suffered to fall on one like Roger, it must have been unknown to him. Of this I am as sure as of my life.