‘Good morning to you, Prince Rupert,’ said Elizabeth triumphantly; ‘do you wish for any more?’

Rupert made no answer, but pulled the inkstand across the table, opened the paper-case, and took up a pen.

‘Oh!’ said Elizabeth, ’I suppose we may expect a treatise on the art of fortification, salient angles, and covered ways, not forgetting the surrender of Bristol.’

No reply, but Rupert scratched away very diligently with his pen, the inkstand preventing Elizabeth from seeing what he was about.

‘Anne,’ said Elizabeth, leaning back, and turning round, ’I am thinking of making a collection of the heroes who could not bear to be beaten at chess, beginning with Charlemagne’s Paladins, who regularly beat out each other’s brains with the silver chess-board, then the Black Prince, and Philippe of Burgundy.  Can you help me to any more?’

Anne did not hear, and Rupert remained silent as ever; and Elizabeth, determining to let him make himself as silly as he pleased, took up her work and sewed on her braid very composedly.  Katherine had come down again at dinner-time, and was working in silence.  She had been standing by the piano, but finding that no one asked her to play, or took any notice of her, she had come back to the table.

‘Dear me, Prince Rupert,’ said she, looking over his shoulder, ’what strange thing are you doing there?’

‘A slight sketch,’ said he, ’to be placed in Lizzie’s album as a companion to a certain paragraph which I believe she has studied.’

Rupert threw his pen-and-ink drawing down before Elizabeth.  It was really not badly done, and she saw in a moment, by the help of the names which he had scribbled below in his worst of all bad writing, that it represented the Giants, Pope and Pagan, as described in the Pilgrim’s Progress, while, close to Pope, was placed a delineation very like Don Quixote, purporting to be the superannuated Giant Chivalry, biting his nails at a dapper little personification of ‘Civil and Religious Liberty.’  A figure whose pointed head, lame foot, and stout walking-stick, shewed him to be intended for Sir Walter Scott, was throwing over him an embroidered surcoat, which a most striking and ludicrous likeness of Mr. Augustus Mills was pulling off at the other end; and the scene was embellished by a ruined castle in the distance, and a quantity of skulls and cross-bones in the fore-ground.  Elizabeth could not but think it unkind of him to jest on this matter, while her eye-lids were still burning and heavy from the tears it had caused her to shed; but she knew Rupert well enough to be certain that it was only a sign that he was out of temper, and had not yet conquered his old boyish love of teazing.  She put the paper into her basket, saying, in a low tone, ’Thank you, Rupert; I shall keep it as a memorial of several things, some of which may do me good; but I fear it will always put me in mind that cavaliers of the present day would have little objection to such battles as I was speaking of, even with women, if this poor old gentleman did not retain a small degree of vitality.’