The Laughing Cavalier. Baroness Orczy

desirous of closing this abode of pleasure. As for me, my lodgings being paid for I do not care to leave them unoccupied."

      Whereupon he rose and to Mynheer Beek—who came to him with that same ubiquitous smile which did duty for all the customers of the "Lame Cow"—he threw the three silver guilders which the latter demanded in payment for the wine and ale supplied to the honourable gentleman: then as he met the mocking glance of his former interlocutor he said with a recrudescence of gaiety:

      "I still have my lodgings, gentle sir, and need not sell my soul or my skin until after I have felt a gnawing desire for breakfast."

      With a graceful flourish of his plumed hat he bowed to the assembled company and walked out of the tap-room of the "Lame Cow" with swagger that would have befitted the audience chamber of a king.

      In his wake followed the band of his boon companions, they too strode out of the place with much jingle of steel and loud clatter of heavy boots and accoutrements. They laughed and talked loudly as they left and gesticulated with an air of independence which once more drew upon them the wrathful looks and contemptuous shrugs of the sober townsfolk.

      Diogenes alone as he finally turned once again in the doorway encountered many a timid glance levelled at him that were soft and kindly. These glances came from the women, from the young and from the old, for women are strange creatures of whims and of fancies, and there was something in the swaggering insolence of that young malapert that made them think of breezy days upon the sea-shore, of the song of the soaring lark, of hyacinths in bloom and the young larches on the edge of the wood.

      And I imagine that their sluggish Dutch blood yielded to these influences and was greatly stirred by memories of youth.