Such was the refuge to which Ramiro and his son, Adrian, had been led by Hague Simon and Black Meg, after they had escaped with their lives from Leyden upon the night of the image-breaking in the church, that ominous night when the Abbe Dominic gave up the ghost on the arm of the lofty Rood, and Adrian had received absolution and baptism from his consecrated hand.

On the journey hither Adrian asked no questions as to their destination; he was too broken in heart and too shaken in body to be curious; life in those days was for him too much of a hideous phantasmagoria of waste and blackness out of which appeared vengeful, red-handed figures, out of which echoed dismal, despairing voices calling him to doom.

They came to the place and found its great basement and the floors above, or some of them, furnished after a fashion.  The mill had been inhabited, and recently, as Adrian gathered, by smugglers, or thieves, with whom Meg and Simon were in alliance, or some such outcast evil-doers who knew that here the arm of the law could not reach them.  Though, indeed, while Alva ruled in the Netherlands there was little law to be feared by those who were rich or who dared to worship God after their own manner.

“Why have we come here—­father,” Adrian was about to add, but the word stuck in his throat.

Ramiro shrugged his shoulders and looked round him with his one criticising eye.

“Because our guides and friends, the worthy Simon and his wife, assure me that in this spot alone our throats are for the present safe, and by St. Pancras, after what we saw in the church yonder I am inclined to agree with them.  He looked a poor thing up under the roof there, the holy Father Dominic, didn’t he, hanging up like a black spider from the end of his cord?  Bah! my backbone aches when I think of him.”

“And how long are we to stop here?”

“Till—­till Don Frederic has taken Haarlem and these fat Hollanders, or those who are left of them, lick our boots for mercy,” and he ground his teeth, then added:  “Son, do you play cards?  Good, well let us have a game.  Here are dice; it will serve to turn our thoughts.  Now then, a hundred guilders on it.”

So they played and Adrian won, whereon, to his amazement, his father paid him the money.

“What is the use of that?” asked Adrian.

“Gentlemen should always pay their debts at cards.”

“And if they cannot?”

“Then they must keep score of the amount and discharge it when they are able.  Look you, young man, everything else you may forget, but what you lose over the dice is a debt of honour.  There lives no man who can say that I cheated him of a guilder at cards, though I fear some others have my name standing in their books.”

When they rose from their game that night Adrian had won between three and four hundred florins.  Next day his winnings amounted to a thousand florins, for which his father gave him a carefully-executed note of hand; but at the third sitting the luck changed or perhaps skill began to tell, and he lost two thousand florins.  These he paid up by returning his father’s note, his own winnings, and all the balance of the purse of gold which his mother had given to him when he was driven from the house, so that now he was practically penniless.