able nap on the settle by the stove, from which he had been rudely
awakened by his wife.

Mary was obliged to do as Gretchen bid her, and was constrained to
acknowledge that she felt the better for the food, of which she had been so
unwilling to partake.

Master Gifford's house was frequented by many faithful Puritans in Arnhem,
and amongst them was a lady named Gruithuissens, who was well-known for her
benevolence and tender sympathy with all who were sorrowful and oppressed.

As was natural, therefore, she was attracted by Mary Gifford, and her
friendship had been one of the compensations Mary felt God had granted her
for the ever present loss of her boy.

Madam Gruithuissens' house faced the street on one side and overlooked the
river on the other. The window of her long, spacious parlour opened out
upon a verandah, and had a typical view of the Low Countries stretched
before them. A wide, far-reaching expanse of meadow-land and water--the
flat country vanishing in the sky-line many miles distant.

A contrast, indeed, to the wood-covered heights and undulating pastures of
the fair country of Kent, where the home of the Sidneys stands in all its
stately time-honoured pride.

Mary Gifford's thoughts were there at this moment. A summer evening came
back to her when she sat at the casement of Ford Manor with Ambrose clasped
close to her side. The years that lay between that time and the present
seemed so short, and yet how they had probably changed the child whom she
had loved so dearly.

Humphrey Ratcliffe was right. She had not realised what that change would
be. And then came the ever-haunting fear that Ambrose, if he were alive,
would fail to recognise his mother--might have been taught to forget her,
or, perhaps, to think lightly of her, and to look upon her as a heretic, by
the Jesuits who had brought him up in their creed.

She was roused from her meditations by Mistress Gruithuissens' abrupt
entrance.

'Great news!' she said, 'Great news! Axel is taken, and Sir Philip Sidney
has done wonders. A messenger has just arrived with the news at the Earl of
Leicester's quarters, and Master Humphrey Ratcliffe has been sent by barge
with others of the wounded. There has been great slaughter, and terrible it
is to think of the aching hearts all around us. Women widows, children
fatherless. Yet it is a righteous war, for Spain would massacre tenfold the
number did she gain the ascendant--hearken! I hear footsteps.'