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.

“There’s a girl,” said the sergeant in command of them, “who isn’t bad looking.  Pull her out, men.”

Some fellows stepped forward to do his bidding.  Now Foy went mad.  He did not kill Elsa as she had prayed him, he flew straight at the throat of the brute who had spoken, and next instant his sword was standing out a foot behind his neck.  Then after him, with a kind of low cry, came Martin, plying the great blade Silence, and Martha after him with her long knife.  It was all over in a minute, but before it was done there were five men down, three dead and two sore wounded.

“A tithe and an offering!” muttered Martha as, bounding forward, she bent over the wounded men, and their comrades fled round the corner of the cathedral.

There was a minute’s pause.  The bright summer sunlight shone upon the faces and armour of the dead Spaniards, upon the naked sword of Foy, who stood over Elsa crouched to the ground in a corner of the niche, her face hidden in her hands, upon the terrible blue eyes of Martin alight with a dreadful fire of rage.  Then there came the sound of marching men, and a company of Spaniards appeared before them, and at their head—­Ramiro and Adrian called van Goorl.