So that people called my father the Duke's Private Devil, his Familiar Spirit, his Evil Genius.

But I knew other of it--and this night, of all nights in the year, I was to know better still.
It was a summer midnight--not like the one I told of when the story began, white with snow and glittering with the keen polish of frost.

But a soft, still night, drowsy yet sleepless, with an itch of thunder tingling in the air--and, indeed, already the pulsing, uncertain glow of sheet-lightning coming and going at long intervals along the south.
I crouched and nestled in the hole in the wall where I had long ago hidden the hated red cloak, pulling my knees up uncomfortably to my chin.
And great lumps of bone they were, knotted as if a smith had made them in the rough with a welding hammer and had forgotten to reduce them with the file afterwards.

At that time I was thoroughly ashamed of my knees.
But no matter for them now.

Duke Casimir passed in and shut the door.
"Gottfried," I heard him say, "I am a dead man!" These words from the great Duke Casimir startled me, and though I knew well enough that Michael Texel, the Burgomeister's son, was waiting for me by the corner of the Jew's Port, I decided that, as I might never hear Duke Casimir declare his secretest soul again, I should even bide where I was; and that was in the crevice of the wall among the old clothes, which gave off such a faint, musty, sleepy smell I could scarcely keep awake.
But the Duke's next words effectually roused me.
"A dead man!" repeated Casimir.