“I suppose so, sometime, as he keeps his room.  Do you want to see him?”

“Very much, but you needn’t mention it; my business can wait till we meet.  Get my clothes washed and dried as quickly as you can, will you?  I don’t care about wearing other men’s garments.”

A quarter of an hour later Adrian, cleaned and clothed, different indeed to look on from the torn and hunted fugitive, re-entered the sitting-room.  As he came, clad in Ramiro’s suit, Meg nudged her husband and whispered, “Like, ain’t they?”

“Like as two devils in hell,” Simon answered critically, then added, “Your food is ready; come, Mynheer, and eat.”

So Adrian ate and drank heartily enough, for the meat and wine were good, and he needed them.  Also it rejoiced him in a dull way to find that there was something left in which he could take pleasure, even if it were but eating and drinking.  When he had finished he told his story, or so much of it as he wished to tell, and afterwards went to bed wondering whether his hosts would murder him in his sleep for the purse of gold he carried, half hoping that they might indeed, and slept for twelve hours without stirring.

All that day and until the evening of the next Adrian sat in the home of his spy hosts recovering his strength and brooding over his fearful fall.  Black Meg brought in news of what passed without; thus he learned that his mother had sickened with the plague, and that the sentence of starvation was being carried out upon the body of her husband, Dirk van Goorl.  He learned also the details of the escape of Foy and Martin, which were the talk of all the city.  In the eyes of the common people they had become heroes, and some local poet had made a song about them which men were singing in the streets.  Two verses of that song were devoted to him, Adrian; indeed, Black Meg repeated them to him word by word with a suppressed but malignant joy.  Yes, this was what had happened; his brother had become a popular hero and he, Adrian, who in every way was so infinitely that brother’s superior, an object of popular execration.  And of all this the man, Ramiro, was the cause.

Well, he was waiting for Ramiro.  That was why he risked his life by staying in Leyden.  Sooner or later Ramiro would be bound to visit this haunt of his, and then—­here Adrian drew his rapier and lunged and parried, and finally with hissing breath drove it down into the wood of the flooring, picturing, in a kind of luxury of the imagination, that the throat of Ramiro was between its point and the ground.  Of course in the struggle that must come, the said Ramiro, who doubtless was a skilful swordsman, might get the upper hand; it might be his, Adrian’s throat, which was between the point and the ground.  Well, if so, it scarcely mattered; he did not care.  At any rate, for this once he would play the man and then let the devil take his own; himself, or Ramiro, or both of them.