"You mean that I must not sell the secret which you so nearly betrayed ... have no fear, mejuffrouw, my knowledge of it is so scanty that the Stadtholder would not give me five guilders for it." "Will you swear...." "Such a miserable cur as I am, mejuffrouw," he said lightly, "is surely an oath-breaker as well as a liar and a thief--what were the good of swearing?... But I'll swear an you wish ..." he added gaily. "Surely you ..." she began. But with a quick gesture he interrupted her. "Dondersteen, mejuffrouw," he said more firmly than he had yet spoken before, "if beauty in you is tempered with pity, I entreat you to spare me now: even knaves remember become men sometimes and my patron Saint Bavon threatens to leave me in the lurch." He held open the door for her to pass through, and gravely held out one of the pewter candles to her. She could not help but take it, though indeed she felt that the last word between that rogue and herself had not by any means been spoken yet. But she hardly looked at him as she sailed past him out of the room, her heavy skirt trailing behind her with a soft hissing sound. As soon as she heard the door shut to behind her, she ran up the stairs back to her own room with all speed, like a frightened hare. Had she remained in the passage one instant longer she would have heard a sound which would have terrified her; it was the sound of a prolonged and ringing laugh which roused the echoes of this sleeping house, but which had neither mirth nor joy in its tone, and had she then peeped through a keyhole she would have seen a strange sight. A man who in the flickering candle-light looked tall and massive as a giant took up one of the wooden chairs in the room, and after holding it out at arm's length for a few seconds, he proceeded to smash it viciously bit by bit until it lay a mass of broken débris at his feet. CHAPTER XXXI THE MOLENS Less than half a league to the southeast of Ryswyk--there where the Schie makes a sharp curve up toward the north--there is a solitary windmill--strange in this, that it has no companions near it, but stands quite alone with its adjoining miller's hut nestling close up against it like a tiny chick beside the mother hen, and dominates the mud flats and lean pastures which lie for many leagues around. On this day which was the fourth of the New Year, these mud flats and the pasture land lay under a carpet of half-melted snow and ice which seemed to render the landscape more weird and desolate, and the molens itself more deserted and solitary. Yet less than half a league away the pointed gables and wooden spires of Ryswyk break the monotony of the horizon line and suggest the life and movement pertaining to a city, however small. But life and movement never seem to penetrate as far as this molens; they spread their way out toward 'S Graven Hage and the sea.