o had become quite small, like a
child. Her sweet face was no longer pretty, only pitiful, and all the
roundness of her figure had vanished--she might have been an emaciated
boy. Of the four of them Martha the Mare, who was dressed like a man,
showed the least change. Indeed, except that now her hair was snowy,
that her features were rather more horse-like, that the yellow, lipless
teeth projected even further, and the thin nervous hands had become
almost like those of an Egyptian mummy, she was much as she always had
been.

Martin leaned upon the great sword and groaned. "Curses on them, the
cowards," he muttered; "why did they not let us go out and die fighting?
Fools, mad fools, who would trust to the mercy of the Spaniard."

"Oh! Foy," said Elsa, throwing her thin arms about his neck, "you will
not let them take me, will you? If it comes to the worst, you will kill
me, won't you? Otherwise I must kill myself, and Foy, I am a coward, I
am afraid--to do that."

"I suppose so," he answered in a harsh, unnatural voice, "but oh! God,
if Thou art, have pity upon her. Oh! God have pity."

"Blaspheme not, doubt not!" broke in the shrill voice of Martha. "Has
it not been as I told you last winter in the boat? Have you not been
protected, and shall you not be protected to the end? Only blaspheme
not, doubt not!"

The niche in which they were standing was out of sight of the great
square and those who thronged it, but as Martha spoke a band of
victorious Spaniards, seven or eight of them, came round the corner and
caught sight of the party in the nook.

"There's a girl," said the sergeant in command of them, "who isn't bad
looking. Pull her out, men."

Some fellows stepped forward to do his bidding. Now Foy went mad. He did
not kill Elsa as she had prayed him, he flew straight at the throat of
the brute who had spoken, and next instant his sword was standing out
a foot behind his neck. Then after him, with a kind of low cry, came
Martin, plying the great blade Silence, and Martha after him with her
long knife. It was all over in a minute, but before it was done there
were five men down, three dead and two sore wounded.

"A tithe and an offering!" muttered Martha as, bounding forward, she
bent over the wounded men, and their comrades fled round the corner of
the cathedral.

There was a minute's pause. The bright summer sunlight shone upon the
faces and armour of the dead Spaniards, upon the naked sword of Foy,
who s