and the spires of village churches,
marshes where the snipe and bittern boomed, the herons fed, and in
summer the frogs croaked all night long.

Such was the refuge to which Ramiro and his son, Adrian, had been led by
Hague Simon and Black Meg, after they had escaped with their lives from
Leyden upon the night of the image-breaking in the church, that ominous
night when the Abbe Dominic gave up the ghost on the arm of the
lofty Rood, and Adrian had received absolution and baptism from his
consecrated hand.

On the journey hither Adrian asked no questions as to their destination;
he was too broken in heart and too shaken in body to be curious; life in
those days was for him too much of a hideous phantasmagoria of waste
and blackness out of which appeared vengeful, red-handed figures, out of
which echoed dismal, despairing voices calling him to doom.

They came to the place and found its great basement and the floors
above, or some of them, furnished after a fashion. The mill had been
inhabited, and recently, as Adrian gathered, by smugglers, or thieves,
with whom Meg and Simon were in alliance, or some such outcast
evil-doers who knew that here the arm of the law could not reach them.
Though, indeed, while Alva ruled in the Netherlands there was little law
to be feared by those who were rich or who dared to worship God after
their own manner.

"Why have we come here--father," Adrian was about to add, but the word
stuck in his throat.

Ramiro shrugged his shoulders and looked round him with his one
criticising eye.

"Because our guides and friends, the worthy Simon and his wife, assure
me that in this spot alone our throats are for the present safe, and
by St. Pancras, after what we saw in the church yonder I am inclined
to agree with them. He looked a poor thing up under the roof there, the
holy Father Dominic, didn't he, hanging up like a black spider from the
end of his cord? Bah! my backbone aches when I think of him."

"And how long are we to stop here?"

"Till--till Don Frederic has taken Haarlem and these fat Hollanders, or
those who are left of them, lick our boots for mercy," and he ground
his teeth, then added: "Son, do you play cards? Good, well let us have
a game. Here are dice; it will serve to turn our thoughts. Now then, a
hundred guilders on it."

So they played and Adrian won, whereon, to his amazement, his father
paid him the money.

"What is the use of that?" asked Adrian.

"Gentlemen sho