Then she sprang back.
"Do not touch me," she cried, "remember what I am and why I stay here." "I know well what you are, Lysbeth," he answered slowly; "you are the holiest and purest woman who ever walked this earth; you are an angel upon this earth; you are the woman who gave her honour to save the man she loved.

Oh! be silent, be silent, I have heard the story; I know it every word, and here I kneel before you, and, next to my God, I worship you, Lysbeth, I worship you." "But the child," she murmured, "it lives, and it is mine and the man's." Dirk's face hardened a little, but he only answered: "We must bear our burdens; you have borne yours, I must bear mine," and he seized her hands and kissed them, yes, and the hem of her garment and kissed it also.
So these two plighted their troth.
Afterwards Lysbeth heard all the story.

Montalvo had been put upon his trial, and, as it chanced, things went hard with him.

Among his judges one was a great Netherlander lord, who desired to uphold the rights of his countrymen; one was a high ecclesiastic, who was furious because of the fraud that had been played upon the Church, which had been trapped into celebrating a bigamous marriage; and a third was a Spanish grandee, who, as it happened, knew the family of the first wife who had been deserted.
Therefore, for the luckless Montalvo, when the case had been proved to the hilt against him by the evidence of the priest who brought the letter, of the wife's letters, and of the truculent Black Meg, who now found an opportunity of paying back "hot water for cold," there was little mercy.

His character was bad, and it was said, moreover, that because of his cruelties and the shame she had suffered at his hands, Lysbeth van Hout had committed suicide.