for him. I know that
just now he is in Antwerp on a mission from King James of England to the
Archduchess. He hath oft told Mynheer Beuselaar, our mutual banker, that
he was moving heaven and earth to find the son whom he had lost."

"Heaven and earth take a good deal of moving," quoth Diogenes lightly,
"once a wife and son have been forsaken and left to starve in a foreign
land. Mine English father wedded my mother in the church of St. Pieter
at Haarlem. My friend Frans Hals--God bless him--knew my mother and
cared for me after she died. He has all the papers in his charge
relating to the marriage. It has long ago been arranged between us that
if I die with ordinary worthiness, he will seek out my father in England
and tell him that mayhap--after all--even though I have been a vagabond
all my life--I have never done anything that should cause him to blush
for his son."

Apparently at this juncture, Maria must have knocked at the door of the
tapperij, for Gilda, whose heart was beating more furiously than ever,
heard presently the well-known firm footsteps of her father as he
rapidly ascended the stairs.

Two minutes later Gilda lay against her father's heart, and her hand
resting in his she told him from beginning to end everything that she
had suffered from the moment when after watch-night service in the
Groote Kerk she first became aware of the murmur of voices, to that when
she first realized that the man whom she should have hated, the knave
whom she should have despised, filled her heart and soul to the
exclusion of all other happiness in the world, and that he was about to
pass out of her life for ever.

It took a long time to tell--for she had suffered more, felt more, lived
more in the past five days than would fill an ordinary life--nor did she
disguise anything from her father, not even the conversation which she
had had at Rotterdam in the dead of night with the man who had remained
nameless until now, and in consequence of which he had gone at once to
warn the Stadtholder and had thus averted the hideous conspiracy which
would have darkened for ever the destinies of many Dutch homes.

Of Nicolaes she did not speak; she knew that he had confessed his guilt
to his father, who would know how to forgive in the fullness of time.

When she had finished speaking her father said somewhat roughly:

"But for that vervloekte adventurer down there, you would never have
suffered, Gilda, as you did. Nicolaes....