He smiled and tried very gently to disengage his arm from her clinging, insistent grasp.
"It will not be the first time, Madonna," he said with a light laugh, "that I have had a scuffle with a posse of soldiery ... they sometimes mean no harm," he added reassuringly seeing the look of anxious terror in her eyes, "many a time has a scuffle ended in jollity at a few words of common sense."
"Yes, yes, in Ghent," she urged, "where you are known. But here! ... where no one knows you ... spies of the Inquisition might be about ... if they see you interfering in favour of a heretic or a rebel ... or ... Oh! men have been hanged and burned for lesser crimes than that."
"Ah!" he said looking down with a whimsical smile into her flushed and eager face, "that is part of the benevolent rule which our Sovereign Lord the King exercises over the Low Countries!"
Then seeing that at his flippant words--through which there rang a note of intense bitterness--her eyes had suddenly filled with tears, he murmured tenderly:
"God bless you, Madonna, for your sweet thoughts of me! I pray you let me go! I'll come back soon," he added while a look of triumph flashed up in his eyes, "never fear!"
He ran out quickly into the street.
She hesitated, but only for a second: the next she had followed him, without thought that she had neither hood nor mantle, nor that the unseemliness of her conduct would surely have shocked all the great ladies of Spain.
IV
The Grand' Place was deserted and dark, only here and there in the windows of the Cloth Hall there was a glimmer of light. For a moment Lenora paused in the porch peering out into the gloom, trying to trace whence came the noise of the scuffle, for Mark had already disappeared: then she ran out swiftly, turning to her right from the porch till she reached the corner of a narrow street. Here an oil lamp fixed into a wall by an iron bracket threw a dim circle of light, beyond which the shadows appeared almost impenetrable. It was somewhere in amongst those shadows that a mêlée between shouting soldiers and shrieking women was taking place.