"How good you are! Well, I'll take your advice. Yet it does seem so strange—to be married, and live in Holland, when I never thought that anything could be really nice out of England. But Robert seems to me exactly like an Englishman: that's why I love him so dreadfully."
"And I suppose you seem to him exactly like a Dutch girl: and that's why he loves you so dreadfully," was the answer in my mind; but I kept it there. It might have dashed Phyllis's happiness to realize this truth.
"If I let Robert make arrangements for our marriage almost at once, Freule Menela couldn't get him back, could she, for he would be more bound to me than he ever was to her," said my sister.
"In that line alone lies safety," I replied. "Have you told Miss Van Buren—your stepsister, I mean?"
"Oh yes, as soon as it happened, of course. Nell and I never have secrets from each other—at least, we haven't till lately. I thought she would have guessed, but do you know, she didn't? She fancied, from things I'd said, that I was making up my mind to—that is, to try and learn to care for another person. She disapproved of my doing that, it seems, which is the reason she's been so odd. Not that she didn't consider us suited to each other—the other one and I—but she thought, with all his faults, he was so much of a man that it wasn't fair for a girl to accept his love if she had to try and learn to care for him simply because he happened to be there. I see now, in the light of this new happiness, that she was quite right. But I didn't dream then, that the one man I could really care for, could ever be more to me than a dear friend. And a girl feels so humiliated to be thinking of a man who's engaged to some one else. She gets the idea that the best thing would be to occupy her mind with another man, if there's anybody who likes her very much. And Lady MacNairne has always been hinting this last fortnight—but, oh no, I'm not thinking what I'm saying! Even though you are my brother, I've no right to tell you that."
"Sister, I insist that you shall tell me," I said, with all my native fierceness. And Phyllis is not a girl to rebel, if a male person commands.
"Well, then—but she is perhaps mistaken. I hope now that she is."
"In thinking what?"
"That—that Jonkheer Brederode cares more for me than for Nell."
"I wonder," said I.