The prisoner made no immediate reply, the smile of kindly amusement still lingered round his lips, but presently with an instinctive gesture of pride, he threw back his head and looked around him, as one who has nothing to fear and but little to regret. He met the sympathetic glance cast on him by the man who had done him--was still doing him--an infinite wrong, and all round those of his mute and humble friends who seemed to be listening eagerly now for the answer which he would give to Mynheer. Then with a quick sweep his eyes suddenly rested on the wooden erection beyond the molens that loomed out so tragically through the mist, pointing with its one weird arm to some infinite distance far away. Something in the gentle pathos of this humble deference that encompassed him, something mayhap in the solemnity of that ghostly arm suddenly seemed to melt the thin crust of his habitual flippancy. He looked back on Beresteyn and said softly: "I have a friend, Frans Hals--the painter of pictures--tell him when next you see him that I am glad his portrait of me is finished, and that I asked God to bless him for all his goodness has meant to me in the past." "But your father, sir," urged Beresteyn, "your kindred...." "My father, sir," replied Diogenes curtly, "would not care to hear that his son had died upon the gallows." Beresteyn would have spoken again but Jan interposes once more, humbly but firmly. "My lord's orders," he now says briefly, "and time presses, mynheer." Beresteyn stands back, smothering a sigh. Jan on ahead, then Piet the Red and the six soldiers with the prisoner between them. A few steps only divide them from the gruesome erection that looms more solidly now out of the mist. Beresteyn, wrapping his head up in his cloak to shut out sound and sight, walks rapidly away in the opposite direction. CHAPTER XXXIX "SAUVE QUI PEUT" Then it is that, out of the thickness of the fog a figure suddenly emerges running and panting: a man has fallen up against the group of soldiers who have just halted beside the gibbet. "It is Lucas of Sparendam come back from Delft," they cry as soon as they recognize the stained face, wet with the frost and the mist. Already Jan--who with Piet's help was busy with the rope--has heard the name. His wan, thin face has become the colour of ashes. "Lucas of Sparendam back from Delft," he murmurs, "the Lord save us all!" Lucas of Sparendam was sent yesterday to Delft by the Lord of Stoutenburg to spy and to find out all that was going on inside the Prinzenhof where slept the Stadtholder and his bodyguard of one hundred men-at-arms: and now he has come back running and panting: his clothes torn, his face haggard and spent. He has run all the way from Delft--a matter of a league and a half! Why should a man half kill himself by endeavouring to cover a league and a half in one hour? "A drop of hot wine for Lucas," cries one of the soldiers. "He is faint."