From his interview with his daughter Bodé Volcker comes out a great sadness in his Flemish eyes, and finding Guy waiting for him, breaks forth: “This painter Oliver! What right had such a man to love anything but his country? What right had he, with torture hanging over him, to love my child?” “The right that all men have to love the beautiful,” sighs Guy, Bodé Volcker’s surprising revelations as Doña de Alvas’ convent yearnings having made him not only romantic, but sad. “But not the right to sacrifice the beautiful. Oliver’s treachery to Alva put danger upon Mina, and now his death has broken her heart. She cannot even go to her home for fear of Alva’s torture. Alva!” shrieks the merchant, “who has brought this misery upon me and mine. Alva! who has ruined me.” “Ruined you? How?” queries Chester uneasily. He has been waiting for the merchant, being in need of financial aid, and this talk of ruin makes him anxious. “How?” echoes Bodé Volcker. “First by destroying my home. Second by destroying my business with his tenth penny tax, and third by taking from me as a forced loan for the Spanish government five hundred thousand crowns.” “Do you want to get it back again?” “Heavens and earth! Yes. The money is as good as lost. What wild talk are you jabbering to me?” says the merchant derisively. “It isn’t wild talk!” “Not wild talk about Alva’s repaying his debts?” “No, for I’ll pay them.” “You—a fighting man—pay five hundred thousand crowns? Your sufferings have made you crazy,” cries Niklaas, who thinks Guy is jeering him. “Not at all. Advance me ten thousand crowns, stake your life as I stake mine, and I’ll give you your five hundred thousand crowns and vengeance.” This comes in determined whisper from the Englishman, who has thought this matter over, and concluded that, Oliver being gone, Bodé Volcker, with his Antwerp storehouse, Antwerp ships and Antwerp knowledge, is the man to aid him in this affair, if he has the nerve. “Stake my life? I’ll stake it a hundred times to gain vantage of the man who has robbed me!” “Very well, come with me to my room, we must talk very privately of this,” says Guy, who now feels pretty certain that though Bodé Volcker might not risk his life for patriotism, he would risk it a dozen times over to get back his five hundred thousand crowns. But it is not this man’s motives he cares for, but this man’s action. Arrived at Chester’s room the merchant says: “What do you want?” “First I want a hundred crowns to pay John Haring, who has helped me get your daughter out of Haarlem.” “I will—I’ll give Haring a thousand. And I’ll give you my love, my devotion, whatever else you want for saving my Mina from despair and death,” answers the merchant in grateful voice. “Your life, perhaps.” “Yes, I’ll give that too, to get vantage of Alva.”