The afternoon lay heavy and silent upon the plain. There was as yet no sign of the approach of the enemy from the south, and the low-lying land appeared momentarily hushed under its veil of mist, as if conscious of the guilty secret enshrined within its bosom. The fog, indeed, had thickened perceptibly. It lay like a wall around that lonely figure, still sitting there on the soft earth, with its head buried in its hands.
Far away, the gaunt-looking carcase of the dead horse appeared as the only witness of a hideous deed as yet un-recorded. Each a blurred and uncertain mass — the dead horse and the lonely figure, equally motionless, equally pathetic — were now the sole occupants of the vast and silent immensity.
Not far away, in the little town of Amersfoort, humanity, panic-stricken and terrorized, filled the air with clamour and with wails. Here, beneath the ghostly shroud of humid atmosphere, everything was stilled as if in ghoulish expectancy of something mysterious, indiscernible which was still to come. It was like the arrested breath before the tearing cry, the hush which precedes a storm.
Overhead, a flight of rooks sent their melancholy cawing through the air.
When Pythagoras was within fifty yards of his friend he dismounted, and, leading his horse by the bridle, he walked toward him. When he was quite near Diogenes put out a hand to him.
"I knew you would come back, you fat-witted nonny," he said simply.
"Socrates had to go on with the Stadtholder," the other remarked, "or he'd be here, too." Then he added tentatively: "Will you lean on my arm?"
"Yes, I'll have to do that now, old crony, shall I not?" Diogenes replied. "That devil," he murmured under his breath, "has blinded me!"
