Instinctively their feet had turned into the street of Zaandpoort. Wat's heart suddenly leaped within him. He had come to see the house where he had been happy for a few hours. He would look just once upon the window whence his love had often looked forth, and at that other within which her dear head would even now be lying, shedding soft dishevelled curls distractingly over the pillow--ah! the heart-sickness! To think that never should he see it thus, never now lay his own close beside it, as in wild visions of the night he had often dreamed of doing. But there shone a light from the living-room of Will Gordon's lodging. Shadows moved restlessly across the blind. The house in Zaandpoort Street was still awake and stirring. Wat took a sudden resolution. He would risk all, and for the last time look upon the woman he adored, even though he knew she loved him not. "Hide here a moment, Marie," Wat said to his companion; "over there in the dark of the archway. This is the house of my cousin, a soldier from my own country of Scotland. I would bid him farewell before I go." The young girl looked wistfully at him, and laid her hand quickly on her heart. "Ah, it is the house of your love--I know it," she said, sadly and reproachfully; "and you have said so often that none loved you--that none cared for you." Wat smiled the pale ghost of a smile, unseen in the darkness of the night. "It is true that once on a time I loved one dwelling in this house. But she loved me not--" "It is impossible," moaned Marie. "I know that she must have loved you--" "No, she loved me not," answered Wat; "but, as I think, she loved the man whom you--" Wat stepped back into shadow, and Marie clutched his cloak with a nervous hand. It was Will Gordon who came down the stairs. Haggered, unshaven, looking straight before him with set eyes, he was not the same man who had come so cosily back from the guard-room of the palace the night before with his wife upon his arm. Wat advanced a pace out of the dark of the arch. He held out his hand. "Will," he said, "with you I quarrelled not. And I think that if your wife, who used to be so stanchly my friend, knew my broken heart, she, too, would forgive my hasty words, and be ready to understand evil appearances that were no more than appearances." But Will Gordon did not take the outstretched hand which Wat held a moment in the air and then dropped sadly to his side. "Tell me first," he said, "where you have hidden our Kate, and what you have to do with the killing of my Lord of Barra? After that I will either take your hand or set my sword in your heart."