Nay, do not answer me, first you must eat." Then, going to the pot, she took it from the fire, pouring its contents into an earthen basin, and, at the smell of them, for the first time for days Lysbeth felt hungry.

Of what that stew was compounded she never learned, but she ate it to the last spoonful and was thankful, while Martha, seated on the ground beside her, watched her with delight, from time to time stretching out a long, thin hand to touch the brown hair that hung about her shoulders.
"Come out and look," said Martha when her guest had done eating.

And she led her through the doorway of the hut.
Lysbeth gazed round her, but in truth there was not much to see.

The hut itself was hidden away in a little clump of swamp willows that grew upon a mound in the midst of a marshy plain, broken here and there by patches of reed and bulrushes.

Walking across this plain for a hundred yards or so, they came to more reeds, and in them a boat hidden cunningly, for here was the water of the lake, and, not fifty paces away, what seemed to be the shore of an island.