Considering the events of that night, one may be tempted to suppose that I lay awake for a long time in restless anxiety. But I did no such thing. I had had a hard day of it, and, in addition to that, my personal sorrow and the reaction from what I had passed through, so overcame me that I fell into a kind of stupor, and slept without undressing. When I awoke in the morning it was broad day. The room, however, was not bright, for the shutters, which had been open when I went to bed, had blown together during the night. A sheet of dusty sunlight slanted through the room. I lay half awake, half asleep, watching the shadows fold like tapestry in the sunbeams. I tried to see pictures in them as one does in the clouds of a summer’s night; and soon I found myself dwelling upon the grotesque features of the dwarf, and on the words he had spoken to me when we parted the night before. “I shall not tell you what we have been doing,” he had said. “But I swear, before God, hereafter to be your true friend.” I knew that he had spoken the truth. A few moments before he had been engaged in an attempt to take my life; yet, when he said these words, his voice rang with unmistakable sincerity. He looked me in the face, which is not the way of a liar, and the expression in his face was the expression of truth itself. Of this fact I was mortally certain. What had I done to make his feeling change towards me? We had had but a small matter of words. I had helped him to carry poor old Meg to a place of safety. What else had I done? “Ha!” thought I. “It was she who first warned me of my danger.” Could it be that there was some connection between these two, some unexplained relation that would put a new light upon the small kindness I had shown her? I sprang to my feet. Then I discovered—for I had come fully awake at last—that the door of my room was shut tight and barred on the outside. I fell into a rage. Had they not done enough the night before? Was this some new trap they had laid for me? I beat and banged upon the floor. I kicked viciously against the door. It did not take much of this to bring a response. There was a clattering of feet in the corridor without, the bolt was quickly drawn back and then the door flew open. In the hallway opposite my door stood the patroon. The white-haired dwarf, peering beneath his arm, was making strange faces at me from his half-sheltered position behind his master’s back. Did he mean them for signs of warning? Beyond these two clustered half a dozen surprised domestics. Van Volkenberg gazed at me for a moment and then burst into a fit of hearty laughter. “So they locked you in, did they? Ha, ha, ha! I forgot to tell them that there was a new lodger in the house. We forgot it, eh, Louis?”