“Of which I have no doubt we shall find plenty,” Foy replied cheerfully.  “Meanwhile, the kisses make a good road to travel on.”

After this Elsa did not argue any more.

At length they turned and walked homeward through the quiet evening twilight, hand clasped in hand, and were happy in their way.  It was not a very demonstrative way, for the Dutch have never been excitable, or at least they do not show their excitement.  Moreover, the conditions of this betrothal were peculiar; it was as though their hands had been joined from a deathbed, the deathbed of Hendrik Brant, the martyr of The Hague, whose new-shed blood cried out to Heaven for vengeance.  This sense pressing on both of them did not tend towards rapturous outbursts of youthful passion, and even if they could have shaken it off and let their young blood have rein, there remained another sense—­that of dangers ahead of them.

“Two are better than one,” Foy had said, and for her own reasons she had not wished to argue the point, still Elsa felt that to it there was another side.  If two could comfort each other, could help each other, could love each other, could they not also suffer for each other?  In short, by doubling their lives, did they not also double their anxieties, or if children should come, treble and quadruple them?  This is true of all marriage, but how much more was it true in such days and in such a case as that of Foy and Elsa, both of them heretics, both of them rich, and, therefore, both liable at a moment’s notice to be haled to the torment and the stake?  Knowing these things, and having but just seen the hated face of Ramiro, it is not wonderful that although she rejoiced as any woman must that the man to whom her soul turned had declared himself her lover, Elsa could only drink of this joyful cup with a chastened and a fearful spirit.  Nor is it wonderful that even in the hour of his triumph Foy’s buoyant and hopeful nature was chilled by the shadow of her fears and the forebodings of his own heart.

When Lysbeth parted from Elsa that afternoon she went straight to the chamber of the Vrouw Jansen.  It was a poor place, for after the execution of her husband his wretched widow had been robbed of all her property and now existed upon the charity of her co-religionists.  Lysbeth found her in bed, an old woman nursing her, who said that she thought the patient was suffering from a fever.  Lysbeth leant over the bed and kissed the sick woman, but started back when she saw that the glands of her neck were swollen into great lumps, while the face was flushed and the eyes so bloodshot as to be almost red.  Still she knew her visitor, for she whispered: 

“What is the matter with me, Vrouw van Goorl?  Is it the smallpox coming on?  Tell me, friend, the doctor would not speak.”

“I fear that it is worse; it is the plague,” said Lysbeth, startled into candour.