’Scimus enim quoniam si terrestris domus nomus nostra hujus habitationis dissolvatur, quod aedificationem ex Deo habemus, domum non manufactam, aeternam in coelis.’

The clergymen grasped each other by the hand, then turning bowed together to the marquis, but the conversation was not resumed.

One evening in the drawing-room, after supper, the marquis, in good spirits, and for him in good health, was talking more merrily than usual.  Lady Glamorgan stood near him in the window.  The captain of the garrison was giving a spirited description of a sally they had made the night before upon colonel Morgan in his quarters at Llandenny, and sir Rowland was vowing that come of it what might, leave or no leave, he would ride the next time, when crash went something in the room, the marquis put his hand to his head, and the countess fled in terror, crying, ‘O Lord!  O Lord!’ A bullet had come through the window, knocked a little marble pillar belonging to it in fragments on the floor, and glancing from it, struck the marquis on the side of the head.  The countess, finding herself unhurt, ran no farther than the door.

‘I ask your pardon, my lord, for my rudeness,’ she said, with trembling voice, as she came slowly back.  ‘But indeed, ladies,’ she added, ’I thought the house was coming down.—­You gentlemen, who know not what fear is, I pray you to forgive me, for I was mortally frightened.’

’Daughter, you had reason to run away, when your father was knocked on the head,’ said the marquis.

He put his finger on the flattened bullet where it had fallen on the table, and turning it round and round, was silent for a moment evidently framing aright something he wanted to say.  Then with the pretence that the bullet had been flattened upon his head,

‘Gentlemen,’ he remarked, ’those who had a mind to flatter me were wont to tell me that I had a good head in my younger days, but if I don’t flatter myself, I think I have a good head-piece in my old age, or else it would not have been musket-proof.’

But although he took the thing thus quietly and indeed merrily, it revealed to him that their usual apartments were no longer fit for the ladies, and he gave orders therefore that the great rooms in the tower should be prepared for them and the children.

Dorothy’s capacity for work was not easily satisfied, but now for a time she had plenty to do.  In the midst of the roar from the batteries, and the answering roar from towers and walls, the ladies betook themselves to their stronger quarters:  a thousand necessaries had to be carried with them, and she, as a matter of course, it seemed, had to superintend the removal.  With many hands to make light work she soon finished, however, and the family was lodged where no hostile shot could reach them, although the frequent fall of portions of its battlemented summit rendered even a peep beyond its impenetrable shell hazardous.  Dorothy would lie awake at night, where she slept in her mistress’s room, and listen—­now to the baffled bullet as it fell from the scarce indented wall, now to the roar of the artillery, sounding dull and far away through the ten-foot thickness; and ever and again the words of the ancient psalm would return upon her memory:  ’Thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.’