s if those three demons were determined
to spare me. Though by God," added Jan fervently, "I would gladly have
died rather than have seen all this shame! When they had brought me down
they wound a scarf round my mouth and left me here tied to a beam, while
they disappeared in the fog."

Stoutenburg made no comment on this brief narrative, even the power of
cursing seemed to have deserted him. He left Jan kneeling there on the
frozen ground, and without a word he turned on his heel and made his way
once more between the beams under the molens back toward the hut.

Vengeance indeed had eluded his grasp. The two men whom on earth he
hated most had remained triumphant while he himself had been brought
down to the lowest depths of loneliness and misery. Friendless, kinless
now, life indeed, as he had told Gilda, was at an end for him. Baffled
vengeance would henceforth make him a perpetual exile and a fugitive
with every man's hand raised against him, a price once more upon his
head.

The world doth at times allow a man to fail in the task of his life, it
will forgive that one failure and allow the man to try again. But a
second failure is unforgivable, men turn away from the blunderer in
contempt. Who would risk life, honour and liberty in a cause that has
twice failed?

Stoutenburg knew this. He knew that within the next hour his friends
would already have practically deserted him. Panic-stricken now they
would accompany him as far as the coast, they would avail themselves of
all the measures which he had devised for their mutual safety, but in
their innermost hearts they would already have detached themselves from
his future ill-fortunes; and anon, in a few months mayhap, when the
Stadtholder had succumbed to the disease which was threatening his life,
they would all return to their homes and to their kindred and forget
this brief episode wherein their leader's future had been so completely
and so irretrievably wrecked.

They would forget, only he--Stoutenburg--would remain the pariah, the
exile, that carries the brand of traitor for ever upon the pages of his
life.

And now the hut is once more in sight, and for one brief instant an
inward light flickers up in Stoutenburg's dulled eyes. Gilda is there,
Gilda whom he loves, and whose presence in the sorrow-laden years that
are to come would be a perpetual compensation for all the humiliation
and all the shame which he had endured.

To-day mayhap she would follow