"What I meant?"
"It doesn't matter. Well, make your mind easy, sweet sister. Alb adores you—has adored you since the first moment he set eyes on you, and will till he closes them in death. That's my conviction as his lifetime friend. And my advice is, go on being engaged to him until you marry him."
"Mariner, what an old trump you are!" broke in Brederode. And there he was behind me, neat as a pin, in his own suit of clothes, and radiant in his new suit of happiness.
"I give her to you, Alb," said I. And then I strolled away again, humming to the air of the Dead March, in Saul, or something equivalent, those haunting words—
Giving agreeable girls away——
One for you, and one for you, but never, never one for me!
XXXVI
I felt, when I waked up on the morning of butter-market-day at Middelburg, as if I had not slept at all, but had listened throughout the night to the sweet, the incredibly sweet chimes that floated like perfume in the air. Yet I suppose I must have slept, for the bells had sometimes stopped playing their one melodious tune, to tinkle in my dreams, "One for you, and one for you, but never, never one for me?"
The hotel is a nice hotel, and there is a garden. After breakfast, I was so tired of brotherliness, of beaming at happy couples, and hearing plans about weddings, that instead of going forth to see the famous Thursday Middelburg sights, at which the world comes from afar to gaze, I slipped away and hid in the garden.