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.