celebrating mass in the newly-decorated tabernacles, amid beautiful music, the odor of incense, and the ringing of bells.  She expected to receive from the Spaniards a place where she could pray and free her soul by confession.  Amid her former surroundings nothing had afforded her any support, except her religion.  A worthy priest, who was also her instructor, had zealously striven to prove to her, that the new religion threatened to destroy the mystical consecration of life, the yearning for the beautiful, every ideal emotion of the human soul, and with them art also; so Henrica preferred to see her native land Spanish and Catholic, rather than free from the foreigners whom she hated and Calvinistical.

The court-yard gradually became less noisy, but when the first rays of morning light streamed into her windows, the bustle again commenced and grew louder.  Heavy soles tramped upon the pavement, and amid the voices that now mingled with those she had formerly heard, she fancied she distinguished Maria’s and Barbara’s.  Yes, she was not mistaken.  That cry of terror must proceed from her friend’s mouth, and was followed by exclamations of grief from bearded lips and loud sobs.

Evil tidings must have reached her host’s house, and the woman weeping so impetuously below was probably kind “Babetta.”

Anxiety drove her from her bed.  On the little table beside it, amid several bottles and glasses, the lamp and the box of matches, stood the tiny bell, at whose faint sound one of her nurses invariably hastened in.  Henrica rang it three times, then again and again, but nobody appeared.  Then her hot blood boiled, and half from impatience and vexation, half from curiosity and sympathy, she slipped into her shoes, threw on a morning dress, went to the chair which stood on the platform in the niche, opened the window, and looked down at the groups gathered below.

No one noticed her, for the men who stood there sorrowing, and the weeping women, among whom were Maria and Barbara, were listening with many tokens of sympathy to the eager words of a young man, and had eyes and ears for him alone.  Henrica recognized in the speaker the musician Wilhelm, but only by his voice, for the morion on his curls and the blood-stained coat of mail gave the unassuming artist a martial, nay heroic air.

He had advanced a long way in his story, when Henrica unseen became a listener.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, in answer to a question from the burgomaster, “we followed them, but they disappeared in the village and all remained still.  To risk storming the houses, would have been madness.  So we kept quiet, but towards two o’clock heard firing in the neighborhood of Leyderdorp.  ‘Junker von Warmond has made a sally,’ said the captain, leading us in the direction of the firing.  This was what the Spaniards had wanted, for long before we reached the goal, a company of Castilians, with white sheets over their armor, climbed out of a ditch in the dim