ee her now as
she was that day; he could see also how that race, which he just failed
to win, had been for him an augury of disaster. Had not the Hollander
again beaten him at the post, and that Hollander--Lysbeth's own son by
another father--helped to it by her son born of himself, who now lay
there death-stricken by him that gave him life. . . . They would take
him to Lysbeth, he knew it; she would be his judge, that woman against
whom he had piled up injury after injury, whom, even when she seemed
to be in his power, he had feared more than any living being. . . . And
after he had met her eyes for the last time, then would come the end.
What sort of an end would it be for the captain red-handed from the
siege of Haarlem, for the man who had brought Dirk van Goorl to
his death, for the father who had just planted a dagger between the
shoulders of his son because, at the last, that son had chosen to be
true to his own people, and to deliver them from a dreadful doom? . . .
Why did it come back to him, that horrible dream which had risen in his
mind when, for the first time after many years, he met Lysbeth face to
face there in the Gevangenhuis, that dream of the pitiful little man
falling, falling through endless space, and at the bottom of the gulf
two great hands, hands hideous and suggestive, reaching through the
shadows to receive him?

Like his son, Adrian, Ramiro was superstitious; more, his intellect, his
reading, which in youth had been considerable, his observation of men
and women, all led him to the conclusion that death is a wall with many
doors in it; that on this side of the wall we may not linger or sleep,
but must pass each of us through his appointed portal straight to the
domain prepared for us. If so, what would be his lot, and who would be
waiting to greet him yonder? Oh! terrors may attend the wicked after
death, but in the case of some they do not tarry until death; they leap
forward to him whom it is decreed must die, forcing attention with their
eager, craving hands, with their obscure and ominous voices. . . . About
him the sweet breath of the summer afternoon, the skimming swallows,
the meadows starred with flowers; within him every hell at which the
imagination can so much as hint.

Before he passed the gates of Leyden, in those few short hours, Ramiro,
to Elsa's eyes, had aged by twenty years.

Their little boat was heavy laden, the wind was against them, and they
had a dying man and