"You never will understand your brother, Mark," she said with deep earnestness, "not as long as you live. You never will understand your mother either. You are your father’s son--Laurence is more wholly mine. You can look on with indifference--God help you! even with levity--on the awful tyranny which has well-nigh annihilated our beautiful land of Flanders. On you the weight of Spanish oppression sits over lightly.... Sometimes I think I ought to thank God that He has given you a shallow nature, and that I am not doomed to see both my sons suffer as Laurence--my eldest--does. To him, Mark, his country and her downtrodden liberties are almost a religion: every act of tyranny perpetrated by that odious Alva is a wrong which he swears to avenge. What he suffers in the innermost fibre of his being every time that your father lends a hand in the abominable work of persecution nobody but I--his mother--will ever know. Your father’s abject submission to Alva has eaten into his very soul. From a gay, light-hearted lad he has become a stern and silent man. What schemes for the overthrow of tyrants go on within his mind, I dare not even think. That awful bloodhound de Vargas--murderer, desecrator, thief--he loathes with deadly abomination. When the order came forth from your father that he should forthwith prepare for his early marriage to the daughter of that execrable man, he even thought of death as preferable to a union against which his innermost soul rose in revolt." She had spoken thus lengthily, very slowly but with calm and dignified firmness. Mark was silent. There was a grandeur about the mother’s defence of her beloved son which checked the word of levity upon his lips. Now Clémence van Rycke sank back in her chair exhausted by her sustained effort. She closed her eyes for a while, and Mark could not help but note how much his mother had aged in the past two years, how wearied she looked and how pathetic and above all how timid, like one on whom fear is a constant attendant. When he spoke again, it was more seriously and with great gentleness. "I had no thought, mother dear," he said, "of belittling Laurence’s earnestness, nor yet his devotion. I’ll even admit, an you wish, that the present situation is tragic. It is now past six o’clock. Father must be at the Town Hall within the next two hours.... He must be told, and at once.... The question is, what can we tell him to ... to..." "To soften the blow and to appease his fury," broke in Clémence van Rycke, and once more the look of terror crept into her eyes--a look which made her stooping figure look still more wizened and forlorn. "Mark," she added under her breath, "your father is frightened to death of the Duke of Alva. I believe that he would sacrifice Laurence and even me to save himself from the vengeance of those people."