It was noon and past on the fatal twelfth of July. The gates were open, the Spaniards, those who were left alive of them, Don Frederic at their head, with drums beating, banners flying, and swords sharpened for murder, were marching into the city of Haarlem. In a deep niche between two great brick piers of the cathedral were gathered four people whom we know. War and famine had left them all alive, yet they had borne their share of both. In every enterprise, however desperate, Foy and Martin had marched, or stood, or watched side by side, and well did the Spaniards know the weight of the great sword Silence and the red-headed giant who wielded it. Mother Martha, too, had not been idle. Throughout the siege she had served as the lieutenant of the widow Hasselaer, who with a band of three hundred women fought day and night alongside of their husbands and brothers. Even Elsa, who although she was too delicate and by nature timid and unfitted to go out to battle, had done her part, for she laboured at the digging of mines and the building of walls till her soft hands were rough and scarred. How changed they were. Foy, whose face had been so youthful, looked now like a man on the wrong side of middle age. The huge Martin might have been a great skeleton on which hung clothes, or rather rags and a rent bull’s hide, with his blue eyes shining in deep pits beneath the massive, projecting skull. Elsa too 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.