er hand some broidered caps which apparently she was
offering for sale. These caps she began to slowly fold up and place one
by one in a hide satchel that was hung about her shoulders. All this
while she was watching Lysbeth with her keen black eyes, except when
from time to time she took them off her to follow the flight of that
person who had called herself the Mare.

"You keep ill company, lady," said the cap-seller in a harsh voice.

"It was none of my seeking," answered Lysbeth, astonished into making a
reply.

"So much the better for you, lady, although she seemed to know you and
to know also that you would listen to her song. Unless my eyes deceived
me, which is not often, that woman is an evil-doer and a worker of magic
like her dead husband Van Muyden; a heretic, a blasphemer of the Holy
Church, a traitor to our Lord the Emperor, and one," she added with a
snarl, "with a price upon her head that before night will, I hope, be
in Black Meg's pocket." Then, walking with long firm steps towards a fat
man who seemed to be waiting for her, the tall, black-eyed pedlar passed
with him into the throng, where Lysbeth lost sight of them.

Lysbeth watched them go, and shivered. To her knowledge she had never
seen this woman before, but she knew enough of the times they lived in
to be sure that she was a spy of the priests. Already there were such
creatures moving about in every gathering, yes, and in many a private
place, who were paid to obtain evidence against suspected heretics.
Whether they won it by fair means or by foul mattered not, provided
they could find something, and it need be little indeed, to justify the
Inquisition in getting to its work.

As for the other woman, the Mare, doubtless she was one of those wicked
outcasts, accursed by God and man, who were called heretics; people who
said dreadful things about the Pope and the Church and God's priests,
having been misled and stirred up thereto by a certain fiend in human
form named Luther. Lysbeth shuddered at the thought and crossed herself,
for in those days she was an excellent Catholic. Yet the wanderer said
that she had known her father, so that she must be as well born as
herself--and then that dreadful story--no, she could not bear to think
of it. But of course heretics deserved all these things; of that there
could be no doubt whatever, for had not her father confessor told her
that thus alone might their souls be saved from the grasp of the Evil