“Alas, poor Guy,” I heard him mutter. He could afford to pity, now that it was all over. Then his figure against the lighted window stiffened and he seemed to gather strength again. Two minutes later, when he turned to face us once more, he was quite himself. The night before I had asked myself a question; now I was ready to answer it. Yes, there were two actors in Van Volkenberg manor. I was one. The other was the patroon. And from that moment I conceived a fair notion of how the ground lay between us. Perhaps he knew me, perhaps not; but, at any rate, he suspected me, and this was like to prove my ruin. I recalled just then one of the war cries of the English revolution that my father used to talk so much about. The King and the parliament were pitted one against the other till the bitter end. It was the great church hero, Cromwell, so my father used to say, who first foresaw what the end was going to be. Then grew up that motto, “Thy head or my head,” which neither Roundhead nor Cavalier forgot for many years. Thus it was between Van Volkenberg and me. Disclaim superstition as I would, I could not resist the idea that fate had had a hand in our first meeting and had molded subsequent events. Van Volkenberg, as I learned later, regarded me with even greater superstition than I felt towards him. Though I managed to allay his suspicions for a while, he never seemed quite free in my presence, even when he took me into his confidence and made me his right hand man. As I said, he turned towards us from the window overlooking the terrace, and his manner was quite composed. “Come to my room,” he said cheerily. “I have something of importance to say to you. You may come, too,” he added to the dwarf. We went to the room where he had first received me when I came to the manor-house to present my silver buttons. I glanced warily around the room. There were the books and the maps on the walls, the table littered with papers, and the windows on one side flooding the center of the room with light. I was with my face to the window and the patroon stood opposite me. “Sit.” As he jerked out the short monosyllable, he waved his hand to Louis and me. The dwarf climbed into a huge chair and collapsed loosely into a heap till you would hardly have recognized in him a human being.