ture?--with you?--what do you mean, my lord?" she asked.

"I mean," he replied roughly, "that out of the wreckage of all my
ambitions, my desires and my hopes I will at least save something that
will compensate me for all that I have lost. You said just now that life
could only end in death. Well! next to mine ambition and my desire for
vengeance, you, Gilda, as you know, do fill my entire soul. With you
beside me I may try to begin life anew. I leave for the coast in less
than half an hour; Nicolaes will be with us and he will care for you.
But I will not go without you, so you must come with us."

"Never!" she said firmly.

But Stoutenburg only laughed with careless mockery.

"Who will protect you?" he said, "when I take you in my arms and carry
you to the sledge, which in a quarter of an hour will be ready for you?
Who will protect you when I carry you in my arms from the sledge to the
boat which awaits us at Scheveningen?"

"Nicolaes," she rejoined calmly, "is my brother--he would not permit
such an outrage."

An ironical smile curled the comers of his cruel lips. "Do you really
think, Gilda," he said, "that Nicolaes will run counter to my will? I
have but to persuade him that your presence in Holland will be a
perpetual menace to our safety. Besides, you heard what he said just
now; that you, of course, would come with us."

"My dead body you can take with you," she retorted, "but I--alive--will
never follow you."

"Then 'tis your dead body I'll take, Gilda," he said with a sneer, "I
will be here to fetch you in a quarter of an hour, so I pray you make
ready while I go to deal with that meddlesome instrument of God."

She was spent now, and had no strength for more; a great numbness, an
overpowering fatigue seemed to creep into her limbs. She even allowed
him to take her hand and to raise it to his lips, for she was quite
powerless to resist him; only when she felt those burning lips against
her flesh a shudder of infinite loathing went right through her body.

Soon he turned on his heel and strode out of the room. She heard the
thin wooden door fall to with a bang behind him; but she could no longer
see, a kind of darkness had fallen over her eyes, a darkness, in which
only one figure appeared clearly--the figure of a man upon a gibbet. All
else was blackness around her, impenetrable blackness, almost tangible
in its intensity, and out of the blackness which seemed like that of a
dungeon there came crie