“Oh! it is cruel,” she sobbed, “it is too much to bear.  How can you be so calm, mother, when perhaps Foy is dead?”

“If my son is dead, Elsa, that is God’s Will, and I am calm, because now, as many a time before, I resign myself to the Will of God, not because I do not suffer.  Mothers can feel, girl, as well as sweethearts.”

“Would that I had never left him,” moaned Elsa.

“You asked to leave, child; for my part I should have bided the best or the worst in Leyden.”

“It is true, it is because I am a coward; also he wished it.”

“He wished it, Elsa, therefore it is for the best; let us await the issue in patience.  Come, our meal is set.”

They sat themselves down to eat, these two lonely women, but at their board were laid four covers as though they expected guests.  Yet none were bidden—­only this was Elsa’s fancy.

“Foy and Martin might come,” she said, “and be vexed if it seemed that we did not expect them.”  So for the last three months or more she had always set four covers at the table, and Lysbeth did not gainsay her.  In her heart she too hoped that Foy might come.

That very night Foy came, and with him Red Martin, the great sword Silence still strapped about his middle.

“Hark!” said Lysbeth suddenly, “I hear my son’s footsteps at the door.  It seems, Elsa, that, after all, the ears of a mother are quicker than those of a lover.”

But Elsa never heard her, for now—­now at length, she was wrapped in the arms of Foy; the same Foy, but grown older and with a long pale scar across his forehead.

“Yet,” went on Lysbeth to herself, with a faint smile on her white and stately face, “the son’s lips are for the lover first.”

An hour later, or two, or three, for who reckoned time that night when there was so much to hear and tell, while the others knelt before her, Foy and Elsa hand in hand, and behind them Martin like a guardian giant, Lysbeth put up her evening prayer of praise and thanksgiving.

“Almighty God,” she said in her slow, sonorous voice, “Thy awful Hand that by my own faithless sin took from me my husband, hath given back his son and mine who shall be to this child a husband, and for us as for our country over sea, out of the night of desolation is arisen a dawn of peace.  Above us throughout the years is Thy Everlasting Will, beneath us when our years are done, shall by Thy Everlasting Arms.  So for the bitter and the sweet, for the evil and the good, for the past and for the present, we, Thy servants, render Thee glory, thanks, and praise, O God of our fathers, That fashioneth us and all according to Thy desire, remembering those things which we have forgotten and foreknowing those things which are not yet.  Therefore to Thee, Who through so many dreadful days hast led us to this hour of joy, be glory and thanks, O Lord of the living and the dead.  Amen.”

And the others echoed “To Thee be glory and thanks, O Lord of the living and the dead.  Amen.”