“So much the better for you, lady, although she seemed to know you and to know also that you would listen to her song.  Unless my eyes deceived me, which is not often, that woman is an evil-doer and a worker of magic like her dead husband Van Muyden; a heretic, a blasphemer of the Holy Church, a traitor to our Lord the Emperor, and one,” she added with a snarl, “with a price upon her head that before night will, I hope, be in Black Meg’s pocket.”  Then, walking with long firm steps towards a fat man who seemed to be waiting for her, the tall, black-eyed pedlar passed with him into the throng, where Lysbeth lost sight of them.

Lysbeth watched them go, and shivered.  To her knowledge she had never seen this woman before, but she knew enough of the times they lived in to be sure that she was a spy of the priests.  Already there were such creatures moving about in every gathering, yes, and in many a private place, who were paid to obtain evidence against suspected heretics.  Whether they won it by fair means or by foul mattered not, provided they could find something, and it need be little indeed, to justify the Inquisition in getting to its work.

As for the other woman, the Mare, doubtless she was one of those wicked outcasts, accursed by God and man, who were called heretics; people who said dreadful things about the Pope and the Church and God’s priests, having been misled and stirred up thereto by a certain fiend in human form named Luther.  Lysbeth shuddered at the thought and crossed herself, for in those days she was an excellent Catholic.  Yet the wanderer said that she had known her father, so that she must be as well born as herself—­and then that dreadful story—­no, she could not bear to think of it.  But of course heretics deserved all these things; of that there could be no doubt whatever, for had not her father confessor told her that thus alone might their souls be saved from the grasp of the Evil One?

The thought was comforting, still Lysbeth felt upset, and not a little rejoiced when she saw Dirk van Goorl skating towards her accompanied by another young man, also a cousin of her own on her mother’s side who was destined in days to come to earn himself an immortal renown—­young Pieter van de Werff.  The two took off their bonnets to her, Dirk van Goorl revealing in the act a head of fair hair beneath which his steady blue eyes shone in a rather thick-set, self-contained face.  Lysbeth’s temper, always somewhat quick, was ruffled, and she showed it in her manner.

“I thought, cousins, that we were to meet at three, and the kirk clock yonder has just chimed half-past,” she said, addressing them both, but looking—­not too sweetly—­at Dirk van Goorl.

“That’s right, cousin,” answered Pieter, a pleasant-faced and alert young man, “look at him, scold him, for he is to blame.  Ever since a quarter past two have I—­I who must drive a sledge in the great race and am backed to win—­been waiting outside that factory in the snow, but, upon my honour, he did not appear until seven minutes since.  Yes, we have done the whole distance in seven minutes, and I call that very good skating.”