“Are you awake, lady?” asked a hoarse voice.

“Yes,” answered Lysbeth, “but tell me, how did I come here, and who are you?”

The figure stepped back so that the light from the open door fell full upon it.  “Look, Carolus van Hout’s daughter and Juan Montalvo’s wife; those who have seen me once do not forget me.”

Lysbeth sat up on the bed and stared at the gaunt, powerful form, the deep-set grey eyes, the wide-spread nostrils, the scarred, high cheek-bones, the teeth made prominent by some devil’s work upon the lips, and the grizzled lock of hair that hung across the forehead.  In an instant she knew her.

“You are Martha the Mare,” she said.

“Yes, I am the Mare, none other, and you are in the Mare’s stable.  What has he been doing to you, that Spanish dog, that you came last night to ask the Great Water to hide you and your shame?”

Lysbeth made no answer; the story seemed hard to begin with this strange woman.  Then Martha went on: 

“What did I tell you, Lysbeth van Hout?  Did I not say that your blood should warn you against the Spaniards?  Well, well, you saved me from the ice and I have saved you from the water.  Ah! who was it that led me to row round by that outer isle last night because I could not sleep?  But what does it matter; God willed it so, and here you lie in the Mare’s stable.  Nay, do not answer me, first you must eat.”

Then, going to the pot, she took it from the fire, pouring its contents into an earthen basin, and, at the smell of them, for the first time for days Lysbeth felt hungry.  Of what that stew was compounded she never learned, but she ate it to the last spoonful and was thankful, while Martha, seated on the ground beside her, watched her with delight, from time to time stretching out a long, thin hand to touch the brown hair that hung about her shoulders.

“Come out and look,” said Martha when her guest had done eating.  And she led her through the doorway of the hut.

Lysbeth gazed round her, but in truth there was not much to see.  The hut itself was hidden away in a little clump of swamp willows that grew upon a mound in the midst of a marshy plain, broken here and there by patches of reed and bulrushes.  Walking across this plain for a hundred yards or so, they came to more reeds, and in them a boat hidden cunningly, for here was the water of the lake, and, not fifty paces away, what seemed to be the shore of an island.  The Mare bade her get into the boat and rowed her across to this island, then round it to another, and thence to another and yet another.

“Now tell me,” she said, “upon which of them is my stable built?”

Lysbeth shook her head helplessly.

“You cannot tell, no, nor any living man; I say that no man lives who could find it, save I myself, who know the path there by night or by day.  Look,” and she pointed to the vast surface of the mere, “on this great sea are thousands of such islets, and before they find me the Spaniards must search them all, for here upon the lonely waters no spies or hound will help them.”  Then she began to row again without even looking round, and presently they were in the clump of reeds from which they had started.