ever there was one!

But hanging? Bah!

The men murmur audibly as plank upon plank is nailed. Jan directs
operations whilst Piet the Red keeps guard over the prisoner. Two or
three of the country louts know something of carpentering. They do the
work under Jan's watchful eye. They grumble but they work, for no one
has been paid yet, and if you rebel you are like to be shot, and in any
case you lose your pay.

And Diogenes leaning up against the beam watches with lazy quaintly
smiling eyes the preparations that are going on not a hundred paces away
from him. After a while the darkness all around is beginning to yield to
the slow insistence of dawn. It rises slowly behind the veils of mist
which still envelop the distant East. Gradually an impalpable greyness
creeps around the molens, objects begin to detach themselves one by one
out of the gloom, the moving figures of the mercenaries, the piles of
arms heaped up here and there out of the damp, the massive beams slimy
and green which support the molens, and a little further on the tall
erection with a projecting arm round which great activity reigns.

Diogenes watches it all with those same lazy eyes, and that same
good-humoured smile lingering round his lips. That tall erection over
there which still looks ghostlike through the mist is for him. The game
of life is done and he has lost. Death is there at the end of the
projecting arm on which even now Jan is fixing a rope.

"Death in itself matters but little," mused the philosopher with
his gently ironical smile. "I would have chosen another mode than
hanging ... but after all 'tis swift and sure; and of course now she
will never know."

Know what, O philosopher? What is it that she--Gilda--with the fair
curls and the blue eyes, the proud firm mouth and round chin--what is it
that she will never know?

She will never know that a nameless, penniless soldier of fortune has
loved her with every beat of his heart, every thought of his brain, with
every sinew and every aspiration. She will never know that just in order
to remain near her, when she was dragged away out of Rotterdam he
affronted deliberately the trap into which he fell. She will never know
that for her dear sake, he has borne humiliation against which every
nerve of his splendid nature did inwardly rebel, owning to guilt and
shame lest her blue eyes shed tears for a brother's sin. She will never
know that the warning to the Stadtholder came from him, a