There I found all things as they had been when my father died.

I set the windows wide, cast the tumbled bedclothes out upon the dust-heap beneath, and bared the whole to the clean, large, wholesome breezes of the night.  I saw the fateful Red Axe lean as usual against the block, and, taking it up, I found it keen as a razor.  It was spotless, and the edge gave back the long low room and our one glimmering candle like a mirror.  It must have been my father’s last work in this world to polish it.

Then I went down to my own room and cast myself down upon the bed in which, on that night of the first home-coming of the Playmate, I had laid my little wife.

The soldier couched across the door, rolled in his cloak and some chance wrapping he found about the house.

God keep me from ever spending such a night again!  I thought it would never come to an end.  Out in the square in front of the Wolfsberg I could hear a knocking—­dull, continuous, reverberant.  At first I thought it must be within my own head.  So I asked the soldier, after a little, if he heard it also.  I had some faint idea that it might be Prince Karl of Plassenburg with his army thundering at the gates of Thorn.

“’Tis but the scaffold going up in the Grand Place without!” said the soldier, carelessly; “I heard that the Duke had bidden them work all night by torch-light.”

I tried to sleep, but the knocking continued, aching across my brows till I thought I must go mad.  After a while I rose and went to the window from which I had so often looked down wistfully upon the play of the city children.

Opposite me, in the middle of the open space, loomed a dark mass—­a platform, it seemed, raised a dozen feet above the road—­the black silhouette of a ladder set anglewise against it, and that was all.  Lower, plainer, somehow deadlier than a gibbet with its flamboyant beam, which one never sees empty without imagining the malefactor aswing upon it; the heading-block did not frown, it grinned—­yes, grinned like the eye-holes of a skeleton with a candle behind them, while the torches glinted through the interstices of the framework as it was being nailed together.

All night the dull dunt-dunting went on without.  And I sat awake by the window and awaited the dawning.

The city seethed unslaked beneath.  When first I looked from my chamber window the square was free to all who chose to enter it.  But as the knocking went on the news spread through the town of Thorn.

“They are making the scaffold for our Saint Helena!” So the word ran.

And within an hour the courts and alleys of Thorn belched forth thousands of angry men.  Pikes were carried like staves, the steel head hidden up the long white burgess sleeve.  Working-men of the trades, ’prentices, and market porters drew their swords and came forth with the bare blades in their hands, leaving the scabbards at home to take care of themselves, as was their custom.