My host shrugs his shoulders with a helpless movement, and opens wide the fingers of both hands.
"Mynheer, the five days are up. Peter has gone to jail."
"What for?" I ask in astonishment.
"To save two gulden."
ONE OF BOB'S TRAMPS
had passed him coming up the dingy corridor that led to Bob's law office, and knew at once that he was one of Bob's tramps.
When he had squeezed himself through the partly open door and had closed it gently,—closed it with a hand held behind his back, like one who had some favor to ask or some confidence game to play,—he proved to be a man about fifty years of age, fat and short, with a round head partly bald, and hair quite gray. His face had not known a razor for days. He was dressed in dark clothes, once good, showing a white shirt, and he wore a collar without a cravat. Down his cheeks were uneven furrows, beginning at his spilling, watery eyes, and losing themselves in the stubble-covered cheeks,—like old rain-courses dried up,—while on his flat nose were perched a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at us in a dazed, half-bewildered, half-frightened way. In one hand he held his shapeless slouch hat; the other grasped an old violin wrapped in a grimy red silk handkerchief.
For an instant he stood before the door, bent low with unspoken apologies; then placing his hat on the floor, he fumbled nervously in the breast pocket of his coat, from which he drew a letter, penned in an unknown hand and signed with an unknown name. Bob read it, and passed it to me.