A gambler and adventurer becomes husband and, by fraudulent contrivance, gets inheritance of Lysbeth van Hout, an honest and respectful young woman. However, his self-interest and shamelessness turn him into a convict, a murderer of his son. The action of the novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, a founder of the Lost World literary genre, an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, takes place in time of wars, in Europe of the seventeenth century. “Lysbeth, a Tale of the Dutch” was published in 1901; also known by the title "The Secret Sword of Silence”. From the preface: “By an example of the trials, adventures, and victories of a burgher family of the generation of Philip II. and William the Silent, he strives to set before readers of to-day something of the life of those who lived through perhaps the most fearful tyranny that the western world has known. How did they live, one wonders; how is it that they did not die of very terror, those of them who escaped the scaffold, the famine and the pestilence?”