It was during the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell (that mere puppet-play of Power) that the watch kept on the prisoners in the King's Castle grew for a time much less severe and even lax. Arabella was suffered to go out of her chamber, even at the very hours that the Prisoner above was wandering to and fro. The guards did not hinder their meeting; and, says Colonel Ferdinando Glover, one day to his daughter, "I should not wonder if, some of these days, Orders were to come down for me to set both my birds free from their cage. That which Mrs. Greenville has done, you and I know full well, and I am almost sorry that she did not succeed." "Oh, father!" cries Mistress Ruth, who was of a very soft and tender nature, and abhorred the very idea of bloodshed; so that, loving Arabella as she did with all her heart, she could not help regarding her with a kind of Terror when she remembered the deed for which she was confined. "Tush, girl," the Colonel makes answer, "'tis no Treason now to name such a thing. Oliver's dead, and will eat no more bread; and I misliked him much at the end, for it is certain that he betrayed the Good Old Cause, and hankered after an earthly crown. As for this young Popinjay, he will have more need to protect himself than these Kingdoms. And I think that if your father is to live on the King's wages, it had better be on the real King's than the false one." "And do you think, father, that King Charles will come to his own again?" asks Ruth, in a flutter of delight; for Arabella had made her a very Royalist at heart. "I think what I think," replies the Colonel, with his stern look; "but whatever happens, it is not likely, it seems me, that we shall have our prisoners here much longer. That is to say:--Mrs. Greenville, for what she hath done can scarcely be distasteful to those who loved not Oliver. But for my other bird,--who can tell? He may have raised the very Devil for aught I know." "Do you think that he also tried to kill the Protector?" Ruth asks timidly, and just hazarding a Surmise that had oft been mooted betwixt Arabella and herself. "Get thee to thy chamber, and about thy business, wench," the Colonel says, quite storming. "Away, or I will lay my willow wand about thy shoulders. Is there nothing but killing of Protectors, forsooth, for thy silly head to be filled with?" And yet I incline to think that Mr. Governor was not of a very different mind to his daughter; for away he hies to his chamber, and falls to reading Colonel Titus' famous book, _Killing no Murder_, and, looking anon on his Prisoner coming wandering down a winding staircase, says softly to himself, "He looks like one, for all his studious guise, who could do a Bold Deed at a pinch." This Person, I should have said, wore, winter and summer, a plain black shag gown untrimmed, with camlet netherstocks, and a smooth band. And his Right Hand was always covered with a glove of Black Velvet.