I was resolved that if I parted from Herr von Zehren that night, he should not be able to say that I had caused him the loss of a twelfth part of his property, won with so much toil and care, with the risk of the liberty, and lives of so many men, and at the price of his own honor. A boisterous laugh resounded behind me as I left the cutter. It came from Pinnow; he knew what he was laughing about. The cutter, lightened of her lading, was now afloat, and as I gained the beach and turned, she was slowly standing out to sea. He had done his shameful work. At this moment it flashed upon me, "He is a traitor, after all!" I do not know whether it was his laugh of malicious triumph that again aroused my suspicion, or what suggested the thought, but I said to myself, as I closed the file which was headed by Herr von Zehren and Jock Swart, "Now it will soon be decided." CHAPTER XVIII. We had passed the dunes, and were marching in single file across the sandy waste land on the other side. No word was spoken; each man had enough to do in carrying his heavy pack; I perhaps the most of all, although none of the men, unless it might be Jock Swart, equalled me in strength; but in such things practice is everything. And then in addition to my pack, which probably weighed a hundred-weight, I bore another burden from which the others were free, and which pressed me far more heavily--the burden of shame that my father's son was bending under this bale of silk, of which the revenue was defrauded, because I would not cause a loss of property to the man whose bread I had been eating for two months. And then I thought with what happiness my heart beat high when I left Zehrendorf in the morning, and that I was now returning deceived by the daughter, insulted by the father, contaminated by the defilement of the base traffic to which I had lent myself, and that this was the end of my visionary splendors, of my adored liberty! But the end had not yet come. Without a moment's rest we kept on, the wet sand crunching under our feet, when of a sudden a word was given at the head of the file and passed on in an under-tone from man to man until it came to me, who being the last could pass it no further--"Halt!" We had reached the edge of the moor. It could be entered on this side only by a narrow strip which was passable; then came a stretch of dry land, a sort of island, surrounded by the morass on every side, which closed in again at its opposite extremity, perhaps two thousand paces distant, and there was again only a narrow path which a heavily laden man could pass without sinking into the morass. After this came the heath, which extended from the lands of Trantowitz and Zehrendorf on one side to the dunes of Zanowitz on the other, and which I had already crossed three times to-day.