They were passing the island that, many years ago, had formed the turning post of the great sledge race in which his passenger had been the fair Leyden heiress, Lysbeth van Hout.  Ramiro could see her now as she was that day; he could see also how that race, which he just failed to win, had been for him an augury of disaster.  Had not the Hollander again beaten him at the post, and that Hollander—­Lysbeth’s own son by another father—­helped to it by her son born of himself, who now lay there death-stricken by him that gave him life. . . .  They would take him to Lysbeth, he knew it; she would be his judge, that woman against whom he had piled up injury after injury, whom, even when she seemed to be in his power, he had feared more than any living being. . . .  And after he had met her eyes for the last time, then would come the end.  What sort of an end would it be for the captain red-handed from the siege of Haarlem, for the man who had brought Dirk van Goorl to his death, for the father who had just planted a dagger between the shoulders of his son because, at the last, that son had chosen to be true to his own people, and to deliver them from a dreadful doom? . . .  Why did it come back to him, that horrible dream which had risen in his mind when, for the first time after many years, he met Lysbeth face to face there in the Gevangenhuis, that dream of the pitiful little man falling, falling through endless space, and at the bottom of the gulf two great hands, hands hideous and suggestive, reaching through the shadows to receive him?

Like his son, Adrian, Ramiro was superstitious; more, his intellect, his reading, which in youth had been considerable, his observation of men and women, all led him to the conclusion that death is a wall with many doors in it; that on this side of the wall we may not linger or sleep, but must pass each of us through his appointed portal straight to the domain prepared for us.  If so, what would be his lot, and who would be waiting to greet him yonder?  Oh! terrors may attend the wicked after death, but in the case of some they do not tarry until death; they leap forward to him whom it is decreed must die, forcing attention with their eager, craving hands, with their obscure and ominous voices. . . .  About him the sweet breath of the summer afternoon, the skimming swallows, the meadows starred with flowers; within him every hell at which the imagination can so much as hint.

Before he passed the gates of Leyden, in those few short hours, Ramiro, to Elsa’s eyes, had aged by twenty years.

Their little boat was heavy laden, the wind was against them, and they had a dying man and a prisoner aboard.  So it came about that the day was closing before the soldiers challenged them from the watergate, asking who they were and whither they went.  Foy stood up and said: 

“We are Foy van Goorl, Red Martin, Elsa Brant, a wounded man and a prisoner, escaped from Haarlem, and we go to the house of Lysbeth van Goorl in the Bree Straat.”