ce, "is this place
private?"

"Let's see," said Dirk, "they have cleared the things away, and the old
housekeeper has tidied up my bedroom. Yes, I think so. Nobody ever comes
up here after ten o'clock. What is it?"

Brant touched his arm, and, understanding the truth, Dirk led the way
into the window-place. There, standing with his back to the room, and
his hands crossed in a peculiar fashion, he uttered the word, "_Jesus_,"
and paused. Brant also crossed his hands and answered, or, rather,
continued, "_wept_." It was the password of those of the New Religion.

"You are one of us, cousin?" said Dirk.

"I and all my house, my father, my mother, my sister, and the maiden
whom I am to marry. They told me at The Hague that I must seek of you or
the young Heer Pieter van de Werff, knowledge of those things which we
of the Faith need to know; who are to be trusted, and who are not to
be trusted; where prayer is held, and where we may partake of the pure
Sacrament of God the Son."

Dirk took his cousin's hand and pressed it. The pressure was returned,
and thenceforward brother could not have trusted brother more
completely, for now between them was the bond of a common and burning
faith.

Such bonds the reader may say, tie ninety out of every hundred people
to each other in the present year of grace, but it is not to be observed
that a like mutual confidence results. No, because the circumstances
have changed. Thanks very largely to Dirk van Goorl and his fellows of
that day, especially to one William of Orange, it is no longer necessary
for devout and God-fearing people to creep into holes and corners, like
felons hiding from the law, that they may worship the Almighty after
some fashion as pure as it is simple, knowing the while that if they are
found so doing their lot and the lot of their wives and children will
be the torment and the stake. Now the thumbscrew and the rack as
instruments for the discomfiture of heretics are relegated to the
dusty cases of museums. But some short generations since all this was
different, for then a man who dared to disagree with certain doctrines
was treated with far less mercy than is shown to a dog on the
vivisector's table.

Little wonder, therefore, that those who lay under such a ban, those who
were continually walking in the cold shadow of this dreadful doom, clung
to each other, loved each other, and comforted each other to the last,
passing often enough hand-in-hand through