"Messire," he said appealingly, "what of her?"
"Pray for her, Messire," replied Leatherface quietly, "she suffers more than you do."
"Must we all curse her then? or else be traitors to our own people."
"Nay! you can pity her! What she did, she did from her own sense of patriotism and of justice. She hates us all, Messire, as the enemies of her people. She hates and despises me as the assassin of the man she loved. Pray for her, Messire, but in pity pray also for the man who whilst striving to win her heart, only succeeded in breaking his own."
VI
An hour later in the house in the Nieuwstraat, Clémence van Rycke was still awake. She sat in her favourite tall chair beside the hearth, and Laurence her son was kneeling beside her.
"It is too late now, mother," he was saying gloomily. "No power on earth can save you. Would to God you had let me take you to Brügge this afternoon."
"And desert my post like a coward," retorted Clémence hotly. "I can do little, 'tis true; but when the hour comes I can tend the sick and the dying, and pray for the dead; and if you are taken from me, Laurence, I can be laid beside you.... But," she added, with such an intensity of bitterness and hatred that her voice nearly choked her as she spoke, "I would not owe my safety to that execrable traitress..."
"Hush, mother, in the name of Heaven..." broke in Laurence with a heart-broken sob.
"Are you, too, going to defend her?" retorted the mother fiercely.