But, even as one by one they filed out of the presence of the tyrant, they still prayed ... prayed to God to help them and their fellow-citizens in this the darkest hour of their lives. Truly, if these valiant people of Flanders had lost their faith and trust in God then they would have gone absolutely and irretrievably under into the awful vortex of oppression which threatened to crush the very existence of their nation, and would have hurled them into the bottomless abyss of self-destruction. CHAPTER XV TWO PICTURES I These stand out clearly among the mass of documents, details, dissertations and chronicles of the time--so clearly indeed that only a brief mention of them will suffice here. First: Lenora in the small room which adjoined the council chamber within Het Spanjaard’s Kasteel in Ghent. She had stood for close upon an hour under the lintel of the open door, her hand clinging to the heavy velvet portière; not one sound which came from the council chamber failed to strike her ear: every phase of that awesome interview between the supplicants and their vengeful tyrant struck at her heart, until at last unable to keep still, she uttered a moan of pain. All this was his work! Not hers! Before God and her own conscience she felt that she could not have acted differently; that if it had all to be done again, she would again obey the still, insistent voice which had prompted her to keep her oath and to serve her King and country in the only way that lay in her power. It was his work! not hers! His, whose whole life seemed to be given over to murder, to rebellion and to secret plottings, and who had tried to throw dust in her eyes and to cajole her into becoming a traitor too to all that she held dear. It was his work, and the terrible reprisals which the Duke of Alva’s retributive justice would mete out to this rebellious city lay at the door of those who had conspired against the State, and not at hers who had only been an humble tool in Almighty hands. But in spite of her inner conviction that she had done right, in spite of her father’s praise and approval which he had lavished on her all the way from Dendermonde to Ghent, she could not rid herself of a terrible sense of utter desolation and utter misery, and of a feeling of pity for all these poor people which caused her unendurable--almost physically unendurable--agony.