tely rose to
go.

Beresteyn paid his account and went out too, in the wake of his friend.

With the advent of the small morning hours the snow once more began to
fan in large sparse flakes that lay thick and glistening where they
fell. At the end of the Kleine Hout Straat where the two men presently
found themselves, the feeble light of a street lamp glimmered through
this white fluttering veil: with its help the group of foreign
mercenaries could be dimly seen in the distance as they took leave of
one another.

The tall form of Diogenes, crowned with his plumed hat, was easily
distinguishable amongst them. He with his two special friends, fat
Pythagoras and lean Socrates, remained standing for a few moments at the
corner of the street after the others had departed: then only did the
three of them turn and walk off in the direction of the Oude Gracht.

For some reason, as unexplainable as that which had guided their conduct
at the "Lame Cow," Beresteyn and Stoutenburg, quite unconscious of the
cold, elected to follow.

Was it not Chance that willed it so? Chance who was busy forging a chain
and who had need of these two men's extraordinary interest in a nameless
adventurer in order to make the links of that chain fit as neatly as she
desired.

At the bottom of the Kleine Hout Straat, where it abuts on the Oude
Gracht, the three philosophers had again paused, obviously this time in
order to take leave of one another. The houses here were of a peculiarly
woe-begone appearance, with tiny windows which could not possibly have
allowed either air or light to penetrate within, and doors that were
left ajar and were creaking on their hinges, showing occasional glimpses
of dark unventilated passages beyond and of drifts of snow heaped up
against the skirting of the worm-eaten, broken-down wooden floors. They
were miserable lodging-houses of flimsy construction and low rentals,
which the close proximity of the sluggish canal rendered undesirable.

The ground floor was in most instances occupied by squalid-looking
shops, from which fetid odours emanated through the chinks and cracks of
the walls. The upper rooms were let out as night-lodgings to those who
were too poor to afford better quarters.

Diogenes with all his swagger and his airs of an out-at-elbows gentleman
evidently was one of those, for he was now seen standing on the
threshold of one of these dilapidated houses and his two friends were
finally bidding him g