As was natural, therefore, she was attracted by Mary Gifford, and her friendship had been one of the compensations Mary felt God had granted her for the ever present loss of her boy.
Madam Gruithuissens' house faced the street on one side and overlooked the river on the other. The window of her long, spacious parlour opened out upon a verandah, and had a typical view of the Low Countries stretched before them. A wide, far-reaching expanse of meadow-land and water—the flat country vanishing in the sky-line many miles distant.
A contrast, indeed, to the wood-covered heights and undulating pastures of the fair country of Kent, where the home of the Sidneys stands in all its stately time-honoured pride.
Mary Gifford's thoughts were there at this moment. A summer evening came back to her when she sat at the casement of Ford Manor with Ambrose clasped close to her side. The years that lay between that time and the present seemed so short, and yet how they had probably changed the child whom she had loved so dearly.
Humphrey Ratcliffe was right. She had not realised what that change would be. And then came the ever-haunting fear that Ambrose, if he were alive, would fail to recognise his mother—might have been taught to forget her, or, perhaps, to think lightly of her, and to look upon her as a heretic, by the Jesuits who had brought him up in their creed.
She was roused from her meditations by Mistress Gruithuissens' abrupt entrance.
'Great news!' she said, 'Great news! Axel is taken, and Sir Philip Sidney has done wonders. A messenger has just arrived with the news at the Earl of Leicester's quarters, and Master Humphrey Ratcliffe has been sent by barge with others of the wounded. There has been great slaughter, and terrible it is to think of the aching hearts all around us. Women widows, children fatherless. Yet it is a righteous war, for Spain would massacre tenfold the number did she gain the ascendant—hearken! I hear footsteps.'
In another moment the door was partly thrown open, and a young soldier, evidently fresh from the scene of action, came in.
'I am seeking Mistress Gifford,' he said. 'I am esquire to Master Humphrey Ratcliffe, and he has dispatched me with a message.'