ng home."

After that a quiet sense of utter weariness pervaded her being, and she
fell into a troubled sleep. She did not heed what went on around her,
she only knew that once or twice during the day there was a halt for
food and drink.

The nearness of her brother, his gentleness toward her, gave her a sense
of well-being, even though her heart felt heavy with a great sorrow
which made the whole future appear before her like an interminable vista
of blank and grey dullness.

It was at her suggestion that arrangements were made for an all night
halt at Leyden, which city they reached in the early part of the
afternoon. She begged Nicolaes that they might put up at the hostelry of
the "White Goat" on the further side of the town, and that from thence a
messenger might be sent to her father, asking him to come and meet her
there on the morrow.

Though Nicolaes was not a little astonished at this suggestion of
Gilda's--seeing that surely she must be longing to be home again and
that Haarlem could easily have been reached before night--he did not
wish to run counter to her will. True enough, he dreaded the meeting
with his father, but he knew that it had to come, and felt that,
whatever might be the future consequences of it all--he could not
possibly bear alone the burden of remorse and of shame which assailed
him every time he encountered Gilda's tear-stained eyes, and saw how
wearied and listless she looked.

So he called a halt at the "White Goat" and as soon as he saw his sister
safely installed, with everything ordered for her comfort, and a
tasteful supper prepared, he sent a messenger on horseback at once to
Haarlem to his father.

Gilda had deliberately chosen to spend the night at the hostelry of the
"White Goat" because she felt that in that quaint old building with its
wide oak staircase--over which she had been carried five days ago, dizzy
and half fainting--the blackened rafters would mayhap still echo with
the sound of a merry laughter which she would never hear again.

But when the sledge finally turned in under the low gateway and drew up
in the small courtyard of the inn--when with wearied feet and shaking
knees she walked up those oaken stairs, it seemed to her that the vivid
memories which the whole place recalled were far harder to bear than
those more intangible ones which--waking and sleeping--had tortured her
up to now.

The bedroom too, with the smaller one leading out of it, was the same