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