Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/192

 to put it in the ground, and entertaining no doubt but that this little farce had been played in order to force him to betray himself, he redoubled his precaution, and employed every means suggested by his crafty nature to watch the others without being watched himself.

He saw Rosa conveying a large flower-pot of white carthenware from her father’s kitchen to lier bed-room. He saw Rosa washing in pails of water her pretty little hands, begrimed as they were with the mould which she had handled, to give her tulip the best soil possible.

And at last he hired, just opposite Rosa’s window, a little attic, distant enough not to allow him to be recognised with the naked eye, but sufficiently near to enable him, with the help of his telescope, to watch everything that was going on at Lœvestein in Rosa’s room, just as at Dort he had watched the dry-room of Cornelius.

He had not been installed more than three days in his attic before all his doubts were removed.

From morning to sun-set the flower-pot was in the window, and like those charming female figures of Mieris and Metzys, Rosa appeared at that window as in a frame, formed by the first budding sprays of the wild vine and the honeysuckle encircling her window.

Rosa watched the flower-pot with an interest which betrayed to Boxtel the real value of the object inclosed in it.

This object could not be anything else but the second sucker, that is to say, the quintessence of all the hopes of the prisoner.

When the nights threatened to be too cold, Rosa took in the flower-pot.