III + 

A minute later the Stadtholder was in the hall. The doors were open and the horses down below in the charge of an equerry. + 

Nicolaes, halfway down the outside stone steps, looked the picture of fretful impatience. With a dark frown upon his brow, he was scanning the crowd, and now and again a curse broke through his set lips when he saw the Stadtholder still delayed by futile leave-takings. + 

“In the name of heaven, let us to horse!” he exclaimed almost savagely. + 

Just at that moment his Highness was taking a kindly farewell of Gilda. + 

“I wish, mejuffrouw,” he was saying, “that you had thought of taking shelter in our camp.” + 

Gilda forced herself to listen to him, her lips tried to frame the respectful words which convention demanded. But her eyes she could not control, nor yet her thoughts, and they were fixed upon the crowd down below, just as were those of her brother Nicolaes. She thought that every moment she must catch sight of that plumed hat, towering above the throng, of those sturdy shoulders, forging their way to her. But all that she saw was the surging mass of people. A medley of colour. Horses, carts, the masts of ships. People running. And children. Numberless children, in arms or on their tiny feet; the sweet, heavy burdens that made the present disaster more utterly catastrophic. + 

Then suddenly she gave a loud cry. + 

“My lord!” she called, at the top of her voice. Then something appeared to break in her throat, and it was with a heartrending sob that she murmured almost inaudibly: “Thank God! It is my lord!” + 

The Stadtholder turned, was across the hall and out in the open in a trice. + 

“Where?” he demanded. + 

She ran after him, seized his surcoat with a trembling hand, and with the other pointed in the direction of the Koppel-poort. + 

“A plumed hat!” she murmured vaguely, for her teeth were chattering so that she could scarcely speak. “All broken and battered with wind and weather⁠—a torn jerkin⁠—a mud-stained cloak. He is leading his horse. He has a three days’ growth of beard on his chin, and looks spent with fatigue. There! Do you not see him?” + 

But Nicolaes already had interposed. + 

“To horse, your Highness!” he cried. + 

He would have given worlds for the privilege to seize the Stadtholder then and there by the arm, and to drag him down the steps and set him on his horse before the meeting which he dreaded could take place. But Maurice of Nassau, torn between his desire to get out of the threatened city as quickly as possible and his wish to speak with the messenger whom an inalienable instinct assured him that he could trust, was lingering on the steps trying in his turn to catch sight of Diogenes. + 

“Beware of the assassin’s dagger, your Highness!” Nicolaes whispered hoarsely in his ear. “In this crowd who can tell? Who knows what deathly trap is being laid for you?” + 

“Not by that man, I’ll swear!” the Stadtholder affirmed. + 

“Nay, if he is loyal he can follow you to the camp and report to you there. But for God’s sake remember your father and the miscreant Gérard. There too, a crowd; the hustling, the hurry! In the name of your country, come away!” + 

There was no denying the prudence of this advice. Another instant’s hesitation, the obstinacy of an arbitrary temperament that abhors being dictated to, the Stadtholder was ready to go. Gilda, on the top of the steps, was more like a stone statue of expectancy than like a living woman. Nay, all that she had alive in her were just her eyes, and they had spied her beloved. He was then by the Koppel-poort, some hundred yards or more on the other side of the quay, with a seething mass of panic-stricken humanity between him and the steps of Mynheer Beresteyn’s house. + 

He had dismounted and was leading his horse. The poor beast, spent with fatigue, looked ready to drop, and, indeed, appeared too dazed to pick his own way through the crowd. As it was, he was more than a handful for his equally wearied master, whose difficulties were increased a hundredfold by the number of small children who were forever getting in the way of the horse’s legs, and were in constant danger of being kicked or trampled on. + 

But Gilda never lost sight of him now that she had seen him. With every beat of her heart she was measuring the footsteps that separated him from the Stadtholder. And the more Nicolaes fretted to hurry his Highness away, the more she longed and yearned for the quick approach of her beloved. + 