Miss Rivers thought she would like to live there, and cultivate flowers; but I told her that she had better not negotiate for the purchase of a house, until she had seen the miles of blossom at Haarlem.
We had not kept up our average of speed to nine miles an hour; for, though we made ten when the way was clear, and no yards of regulation red-tape to get tangled in our steering-gear, the custom of these waterways is to slow down near villages and in farming country. Besides, we met barges loaded to the water's edge, and had we been going fast our wash would have swamped them. As it was, we flung a wave over the low dykes, and sent boats moored at the foot of garden steps knocking against their landing-stages, in fear at our approach. But after Alphen we turned into a green stream, so evidently not a canal that Aunt Fay was moved to ask questions.
Her face fell when she heard it was the Rhine.
"What, this the Rhine!" she echoed. "It's no wider than—than the Thames at Marlow. I was there last summer——"
"You stayed with Lady Marchant," broke in Starr, hastily. It was not the first time he had cut her short, and the little masquerader bristled under the treatment.
"Oh yes; that was when you were painting my portrait, wasn't it?"
Starr flushed, and I guessed why, remembering his Salon success, and recalling that it was his portrait of Lady MacNairne which had been exhibited this year. Of course, I had been stupid not to put the two facts together, and realize that his success and her portrait, must have been one and the same.
The girls had probably heard of it, and must be asking themselves at this moment how a portrait of this little spectacled thing could have been possible. Cruel Aunt Fay! Somehow, she must have known that the face of her alter ego had been painted and exhibited by Starr, and she was enjoying his misery, as bad boys enjoy the wrigglings of butterflies on pins.
In pity I stepped in to the rescue, and began again, before a question about the portrait could fall from the lips of Miss Rivers, on which I saw it trembling.
"It's the Rhine for no particular reason," I said. "It's quite arbitrary. Farther on it's the Oude Rhine, farther still the Krommer, or Crooked Rhine. But if you think little of it here, you'll despise it at Katwyk, where its end is so ignominious that it has to be pumped into the sea."