I had neither father nor mother."

"And he bound you by no promise?

"None at all, madame."

"What, then, can you find to break your heart upon in the suit of
Monsieur Corlaer? You are free. Even as my lord--if I were dead--would
be free to marry any one; not excepting D'Aulnay's widow."

Marie smiled at that improbable union.

"No, I do not feel free." Antonia shivered close to her friend's knees.
"Madame, I cannot tell you. But I will show you the token."

"Show me the token, therefore. And a sound token it must be, to hold you
wedded to a dead man whom in life you regarded as a father."

Antonia rose upon her feet, but stood dreading the task before her.

"I have to look at it once every month," she explained, "and I have
looked at it once this month already."

The dim chill room with its one eye fixed on darkness was an eddy in
which a single human mind resisted that century's current of
superstition. Marie sat ready to judge and destroy whatever spell the
cunning old Hollandais had left on a girl to whom he represented law and
family.

Antonia beckoned her behind the screen, and took from some ready
hiding-place a small oak box studded with nails, which Marie had never
before seen. How alien to the simple and open life of the Dutch widow
was this secret coffer! Her face changed while she looked at it; grieved
girlhood passed into sunken age. Her lips turned wax-white, and drooped
at the corners. She set the box on a dressing-table beside the candle,
unlocked it and turned back the lid. Marie was repelled by a faint odor
aside from its breath of dead spices.

Antonia unfolded a linen cloth and showed a pallid human hand, its stump
concealed by a napkin. It was cunningly preserved, and shrunken only by
the countless lines which denote approaching age. It was the right hand
of a man who must have had imagination. The fingers were sensitively
slim, with shapely blue nails, and without knobs or swollen joints. It
was a crafty, firm-possessing hand, ready to spring from its nest to
seize and eternally hold you.

The lady of St. John had seen human fragments scattered by cannon, and
sword and bullet had done their work before her sight. But a faintness
beyond the touch of peril made her grasp the table and turn from that
ghastly hand.

"It cannot be, Antonia"--

"Yes, it is Mynheer Bronck's hand," whispered Antonia, subduing herself
to take admonition from the grim digits.

"Lock it up; and come directl