"I have no means of finding out, sir, if my father hath or hath not remorse for his wilful desertion of wife and child--England is a far-off country--I would not care to undertake so unprofitable a pilgrimage." "Then why not let me do so, sir?" queried Cornelius Beresteyn calmly. "You?" "Yes. Why not?" "Why should you trouble, mynheer, to seek out the father of such a vagabond as I?" "Because I would like to give a man--an old man your father must be now--the happiness of calling you his son. You say he lives in England. I often go to England on business. Will you not at least tell me your father's name?" "I have no cause to conceal it, mynheer," rejoined Diogenes carelessly. "In England they call him Blake of Blakeney; his home is in Sussex and I believe that it is a stately home." "But I know the Squire of Blakeney well," said Cornelius Beresteyn eagerly, "my bankers at Amsterdam also do business for him. I know that just now he is in Antwerp on a mission from King James of England to the Archduchess. He hath oft told Mynheer Beuselaar, our mutual banker, that he was moving heaven and earth to find the son whom he had lost." "Heaven and earth take a good deal of moving," quoth Diogenes lightly, "once a wife and son have been forsaken and left to starve in a foreign land. Mine English father wedded my mother in the church of St. Pieter at Haarlem. My friend Frans Hals--God bless him--knew my mother and cared for me after she died. He has all the papers in his charge relating to the marriage. It has long ago been arranged between us that if I die with ordinary worthiness, he will seek out my father in England and tell him that mayhap--after all--even though I have been a vagabond all my life--I have never done anything that should cause him to blush for his son." Apparently at this juncture, Maria must have knocked at the door of the tapperij, for Gilda, whose heart was beating more furiously than ever, heard presently the well-known firm footsteps of her father as he rapidly ascended the stairs. Two minutes later Gilda lay against her father's heart, and her hand resting in his she told him from beginning to end everything that she had suffered from the moment when after watch-night service in the Groote Kerk she first became aware of the murmur of voices, to that when she first realized that the man whom she should have hated, the knave whom she should have despised, filled her heart and soul to the exclusion of all other happiness in the world, and that he was about to pass out of her life for ever.