d
Diogenes more seriously, "it will cheer me in the future, when I and all
my doings will have faded from your ken."

"You are not leaving Holland, sir?"

"Not just now, mynheer, while there is so much fighting to be done. The
Stadtholder hath need of soldiers...."

"And he will, sir, find none better than you throughout the world. And
with a goodly fortune to help you...."

"Speak not of that, mynheer," he said firmly, "I could not take your
money. If I did I should never know a happy hour again."

"Oh!"

"I am quite serious, sir, though indeed you might not think that I can
ever be serious. For six days now I have had a paymaster: Mynheer
Nicolaes' money has burned a hole in my good humour, it has scorched my
hands, wounded my shoulder and lacerated my hip, it has brought on me
all the unpleasant sensations which I have so carefully avoided
hitherto, remorse, humiliation, and one or two other sensations which
will never leave me until my death. It changed temporarily the
shiftless, penniless soldier of fortune into a responsible human being,
with obligations and duties. I had to order horses, bespeak lodgings,
keep accounts. Ye gods, it made a slave of me! Keep your money, sir, it
is more fit for you to handle than for me. Let me go back to my
shiftlessness, my penury, my freedom, eat my fill to-day, starve
to-morrow, and one day look up at the stars from the lowly earth, with a
kindly bullet in my chest that does not mean to blunder. And if in the
days to come your thoughts ever do revert to me, I pray you think of me
as happy or nearly so, owning no master save my whim, bending my back
to none, keeping my hat on my head when I choose, and ending my days in
a ditch or in a palace, the carver of mine own destiny, the sole arbiter
of my will. And now I pray you seek that rest of which you must be
sorely in need. I start at daybreak to-morrow: mayhap we shall never
meet again, save in Heaven, if indeed, there be room there for such a
thriftless adventurer as I."

"But whither do you mean to go, sir?"

"To the mountains of the moon, sir," rejoined the philosopher lightly,
"or along the milky way to the land of the Might-Have-Been."

"Before we part, sir, may I shake you by the hand?"

There was silence down below after that. Gilda listened in vain, no
further words reached her ears just then. She tiptoed as quietly as she
could across the room, finding her way with difficulty in the dark. At
last her fumblin