She sank back aghast.

“Why are you frightened, my pretty lady?” asked the Mare.  “I tell you that I live on for only one thing—­to kill Spaniards, yes, priests first and then the others.  Oh!  I have a long count to pay; for every time that he was tortured a life, for every groan he uttered at the stake a life; yes, so many for the father and half as many for the son.  Well, I shall live to be old, I know that I shall live to be old, and the count will be discharged, ay, to the last stiver.”

As she spoke, the outlawed Water Wife had risen, and the flare of the fire struck full upon her.  It was an awful face that Lysbeth beheld by the light of it, full of fierceness and energy, the face of an inspired avenger, dread and unnatural, yet not altogether repulsive.  Indeed, that countenance was such as an imaginative artist might give to one of the beasts in the Book of Revelation.  Amazed and terrified, Lysbeth said nothing.

“I frighten you, gentle one,” went on the Mare, “you who, although you have suffered, are still full of the milk of human kindness.  Wait, woman, wait till they have murdered the man you love, till your heart is like my heart, and you also live on, not for love’s sake, not for life’s sake, but to be a Sword, a Sword, a Sword in the hand of God!”

“Cease, I pray you,” said Lysbeth in a low voice; “I am faint, I am ill.”

Ill she was indeed, and before morning there, in that lonely hovel on the island of the mere, a son was born to her.

When she was strong enough her nurse spoke: 

“Will you keep the brat, or shall I kill it?” she asked.

“How can I kill my child?” said Lysbeth.

“It is the Spaniard’s child also, and remember the curse you told me of, your own curse uttered on this thing before ever you were married?  If it lives that curse shall cling to it, and through it you, too, shall be accursed.  Best let me kill it and have done.”

“How can I kill my own child?  Touch it not,” answered Lysbeth sullenly.

So the black-eyed boy lived and throve.

Somewhat slowly, lying there in the island hut, Lysbeth won back her strength.  The Mare, or Mother Martha, as Lysbeth had now learned to call her, tended her as few midwives would have done.  Food, too, she had in plenty, for Martha snared the fowl and caught the fish, or she made visits to the mainland, and thence brought eggs and milk and flesh, which, so she said, the boors of that country gave her as much as she wanted of them.  Also, to while away the hours, she would read to her out of the Testament, and from that reading Lysbeth learnt many things which until then she had not known.  Indeed, before it was done with—­Catholic though she was—­she began to wonder in what lay the wickedness of these heretics, and how it came about that they were worthy of death and torment, since, sooth to say, in this Book she could find no law to which their lives and doctrine seemed to give offence.