In due course the two colonels arrived. The sight which met their gaze as they neared Lathom House must have caused them some astonishment. The old house bristled with arms. The Parliamentarian assumption that an easy victory was about to be obtained over a houseful of women, children, a few men-at-arms and old servants, was dispersed to the four winds by the sight of these towers and walls manned with soldiers, and the batteries and ordnance facing at all points. Whether the Countess desired to inspire the ambassadors with respect and awe, or whether she feared a sudden attack, she was there to meet the Parliamentarian deputies in formidable battle array. They were conducted to the mistress of the mansion between lines of armed men drawn up on each side, from the gates of the outer court to her presence in the Great Hall, each company ranged under its lieutenant. At the upper end of the hall, her two little daughters at each side, and her women round her, stood the Countess. With a majestic air she bade the officers be seated, and waited to hear them unfold what their general, Sir Thomas Fairfax, had to propose. The brush of the painter who should succeed in depicting that scene would have to be skilful indeed. Words might bring to the mind’s eye the ancient hall, bright with the hues of the women’s attire, the cuirassed buff coats tied with their fringed silken scarves, the gleaming arms of the Royalist soldiery—and in their midst the plainly clad Parliamentarian officers in their linen bands, close-cropped hair, and the tight-fitting head-gear which has earned the enemies of Charles I. their eternal sobriquet of Roundhead. All this and much similar detail of that scene in the old presence chamber of Lathom House rises to the imagination like a brilliant and stately dream of pageantry; but it would be another matter to picture faithfully the repression of varying and contrasting mental agitation working in that assemblage—the courage and the dauntless bearing of the stately lady, the inquiring gaze of her young daughters, the eager, attent gaze of her women amid the rugged and resolute soldiers of their own side, and the endeavours of the emissaries to maintain an unruffled and undiscomfited aspect in the face of the surprise they were experiencing. Their astonishment could only have been of a very complete kind, and the Countess owed no small debt of gratitude at this crisis and later on, to her chaplain, the Rev. Mr Rutter. “All is fair in love and war,” says the old adage, and this faithful and astute ecclesiastic contrived to hoodwink an officer of the Parliamentarians who was among the besiegers. This person was an old friend of Mr Rutter’s from early childhood, and the clergyman had given him to understand that Lathom House was in no way prepared for sustaining a prolonged siege. Possibly at the time Mr Rutter confided to his gossip this particular bit of information it was true to the letter,