"No. I had not the heart. We all knew that we were betrayed. You warned us all and took measures to convene us here to-night; but until the hour when your letter warned me that for the moment all was well, I endured mental torments such as surely the lost souls in hell have never suffered. I saw those lists in the hands of our tyrants--placed there by the instrumentality of a woman who is to me the embodiment of all that is pure and good; I saw--in my mind--the spies of Alva going the round, this very night, and arresting our brave followers one by one ... Oh God! you do not know what I suffered...." "Do not think of that any more, Messire," rejoined Leatherface quietly. "As you see, the lists are now safe in my care. Alas! it is too late to beg you to take your mother out of the city. Guard and protect her well and God help us all." He once more now prepared to go, and Laurence was ready to follow him, but just at the last an impulse caused the latter to detain the mysterious stranger once more. There was still one question which hovered on his lips, the answer to which would perhaps ease that awful burden of sorrow which Lenora’s betrayal had placed upon his soul: "Messire," he said appealingly, "what of her?" "Pray for her, Messire," replied Leatherface quietly, "she suffers more than you do." "Must we all curse her then? or else be traitors to our own people." "Nay! you can pity her! What she did, she did from her own sense of patriotism and of justice. She hates us all, Messire, as the enemies of her people. She hates and despises me as the assassin of the man she loved. Pray for her, Messire, but in pity pray also for the man who whilst striving to win her heart, only succeeded in breaking his own." VI An hour later in the house in the Nieuwstraat, Clémence van Rycke was still awake. She sat in her favourite tall chair beside the hearth, and Laurence her son was kneeling beside her. "It is too late now, mother," he was saying gloomily. "No power on earth can save you. Would to God you had let me take you to Brügge this afternoon." "And desert my post like a coward," retorted Clémence hotly. "I can do little, ’tis true; but when the hour comes I can tend the sick and the dying, and pray for the dead; and if you are taken from me, Laurence, I can be laid beside you.... But," she added, with such an intensity of bitterness and hatred that her voice nearly choked her as she spoke, "I would not owe my safety to that execrable traitress..." "Hush, mother, in the name of Heaven..." broke in Laurence with a heart-broken sob. "Are you, too, going to defend her?" retorted the mother fiercely. "She was compelled to act as she did," murmured Laurence; "she acted in ignorance and innocence. I’d stake my life that she is pure and good."