"None at all, madame."

"What, then, can you find to break your heart upon in the suit of
Monsieur Corlaer? You are free. Even as my lord--if I were dead--would
be free to marry any one; not excepting D'Aulnay's widow."

Marie smiled at that improbable union.

"No, I do not feel free." Antonia shivered close to her friend's knees.
"Madame, I cannot tell you. But I will show you the token."

"Show me the token, therefore. And a sound token it must be, to hold you
wedded to a dead man whom in life you regarded as a father."

Antonia rose upon her feet, but stood dreading the task before her.

"I have to look at it once every month," she explained, "and I have
looked at it once this month already."

The dim chill room with its one eye fixed on darkness was an eddy in
which a single human mind resisted that century's current of
superstition. Marie sat ready to judge and destroy whatever spell the
cunning old Hollandais had left on a girl to whom he represented law and
family.

Antonia beckoned her behind the screen, and took from some ready
hiding-place a small oak box studded with nails, which Marie had never
before seen. How alien to the simple and open life of the Dutch widow
was this secret coffer! Her face changed while she looked at it; grieved
girlhood passed into sunken age. Her lips turned wax-white, and drooped