Lady Heneage, who was one of her attendants in these last terrible days, was removed in a fainting condition, when all was over, and taken to her old friend Martha Swaffham, for care and consolation. The two women had drifted apart during the past four years, but there was only love between them, and they reverted at once to their old affectionate familiarity. And such sorrow as that affecting Lady Heneage, is soon soothed by kind companionship and sympathetic conversation. She had much to tell that Martha Swaffham was eager to listen to, though the matter of all was suffering and death. "The Lord Protector was really her nurse," she said. "When her mother fainted, and her husband and sisters could not look on her sufferings, her father held her in his arms, bore every pang with her and prayed, as I hope, Martha, I may never hear any one pray again. It was as if he clung to the very feet of God, entreating that he, and he alone, might bear the agony; that the cup of pain might pass from his child to him—and this for fourteen days, Martha. I know not how he—how we—endured it. We were all at the last point, when suddenly, a wonderful peace filled the chamber, and the poor Lady Elizabeth lay at ease, smiling at her father as he wiped the death sweat from her brow and whispered in her ear words which none but the dying heard. At the last moment, she tried to say, ’_Father_, but only managed one-half the word; the other half she took into heaven with her. It is now the sixth of August, is it not, Martha?" "Yes." "The Protector will not live long, I think. I heard him tell her they would not be parted a space worth counting." "He would say that much for her comfort. He meant it not in respect of his own days; no life is a space worth counting—’of few days and full of trouble, Alice.’ How is her Highness, Elizabeth Cromwell?" "Very quiet and resigned. Blow upon blow has benumbed her. She looks as if she had seen something not to be spoken of. Lady Mary Fanconberg says the family ought to leave Hampton Court; there is a feeling about the place both unhappy and unnatural. I felt it. Every one felt it, even the soldiers on guard." After the death of his beloved daughter Elizabeth, the life of Cromwell was like the ending of one of those terrible Norse Sagas with the additional element of a great spiritual conflict. He was aware of his own apparition at his side; the air was full of omens; he felt the menace of some shadowy adversary in the dark; he saw visions; he dreamed beyond nature; he had, at times, the wild spirits of a fey man, and again was almost beside himself with unspeakable grief. Israel Swaffham was constantly with him. The two men were friends closer than brothers. They had loved each other when boys, and their love had never known a shadow.