Oh, the first favourable day I will tell you; but, whatever you do, let
nobody help you, and don't confide your secret to any one in the world;
do you see, a connoisseur by merely looking at the bulb would be able to
distinguish its value; and so, my dearest Rosa, be careful in locking up
the third sucker which remains to you."

"It is still wrapped up in the same paper in which you put it, and just
as you gave it me. I have laid it at the bottom of my chest under my
point lace, which keeps it dry, without pressing upon it. But good
night, my poor captive gentleman."

"How? already?"

"It must be, it must be."

"Coming so late and going so soon."

"My father might grow impatient not seeing me return, and that precious
lover might suspect a rival."

Here she listened uneasily.

"What is it?" asked Van Baerle. "I thought I heard something."

"What, then?"

"Something like a step, creaking on the staircase."

"Surely," said the prisoner, "that cannot be Master Gryphus, he is
always heard at a distance."

"No, it is not my father, I am quite sure, but----"

"But?"

"But it might be Mynheer Jacob."

Rosa rushed toward the staircase, and a door was really heard rapidly to
close before the young damsel had got down the first ten steps.

Cornelius was very uneasy about it, but it was after all only a prelude
to greater anxieties.

The flowing day passed without any remarkable incident. Gryphus made his
three visits, and discovered nothing. He never came at the same hours
as he hoped thus to discover the secrets of the prisoner. Van Baerle,
therefore, had devised a contrivance, a sort of pulley, by means of
which he was able to lower or to raise his jug below the ledge of tiles
and stone before his window. The strings by which this was effected he
had found means to cover with that moss which generally grows on tiles,
or in the crannies of the walls.

Gryphus suspected nothing, and the device succeeded for eight days. One
morning, however, when Cornelius, absorbed in the contemplation of his
bulb, from which a germ of vegetation was already peeping forth, had not
heard old Gryphus coming upstairs as a gale of wind was blowing which
shook the whole tower, the door suddenly opened.

Gryphus, perceiving an unknown and consequently a forbidden object in
the hands of his prisoner, pounced upon it with the same rapidity as the
hawk on its prey.

As ill luck would have it, his coarse, hard hand, the same which