hich joy,
surprise and fear struggled for mastery. Her hair though still unruly
was coiled around her head, her shift and kirtle were neatly fastened,
but her legs and feet were bare and above the shift her neck and
shoulders appeared colourless and attenuated. Eyes and hair were dark,
and her skin had the olive tint of the south, but her lips at this
moment looked bloodless, and there was the look of starvation in her wan
face.

Diogenes walked past her into the inner room. The old man was lying on
the bed, and on the coverlet close to him a much fingered prayer-book
lay open. The woman slipped noiselessly past the visitor and quietly put
the prayer-book away.

"You have come to tell us that we must go," she said in an undertone as
she suddenly faced the newcomer.

"Indeed, that was not my purpose," he replied gaily, "I have come on the
contrary to bring you good news, and it was foolish of you to keep me
dangling on your doorstep for so long."

"The landlord hates us," she murmured, "because you forced him last
night to take us in. He came thundering at the door early this morning,
and threatened to eject us as vagabonds or to denounce us as Spanish
spies. I would not open the door to him, and he shouted his threats at
us through the keyhole. When you knocked just now I was frightened. I
thought that he had come back."

Her voice was low and though she spoke Dutch fluently her throat had in
it the guttural notes of her native land. A touch of the gipsy there
must be in her, thought Diogenes as he looked with suddenly aroused
interest on the woman before him, her dark skin, the long, supple limbs,
the velvety eyes with their submissive, terrified look.

With embarrassed movements she offered the only chair in the room to her
visitor, then cast shy, timorous glances on him as he refused to sit,
preferring to lean his tall figure against the white-washed wall. She
thought that never in her life had she seen any man so splendid and her
look of bold admiration told him so without disguise.

"Well!" he said with his quaint smile, "I am not the landlord, nor yet
an enemy. Art thou convinced of that?"

"Yes, I am!" she said with a little sigh, as she turned away from him in
order to attend to the old man, who was moaning peevishly in bed.

"He has lost the use of speech," she said to Diogenes as soon as she had
seen to the old man's wants, "and to-day he is so crippled that he can
scarcely move. We ought never to h