THE CHAUFFEUR AND THE CHAPERON

OTHER BOOKS BY C. N. AND A. M. WILLIAMSON

My Friend the Chauffeur, Lady Betty Across the Water, Rosemary in Search of a Father, Princess Virginia, The Car of Destiny, The Princess Passes, The Lightning Conductor

THE CHAUFFEUR AND THE CHAPERON

BY

C. N. and A. M. Williamson

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KARL ANDERSON

NEW YORK
THE McCLURE COMPANY
MCMVIII

Copyright, 1907, 1908, by The McClure Company

Copyright, 1906, by C. N. and A. M. Williamson

TO
MR. G. VAN DER POT
PRESIDENT OF THE ROTTERDAM SAILING AND ROWING CLUB
WHOSE KIND AND NEVER-FAILING HELP ADDED
TENFOLD TO THE PLEASURES OF OUR
VOYAGE THROUGH DELIGHTFUL
DUTCH WATERWAYS
WE DEDICATE
THE STORY OF THE TOUR

THE CHAUFFEUR AND THE CHAPERON

NELL VAN BUREN'S POINT OF VIEW

I

Sometimes I think that having a bath is the nicest part of the day, especially if you take too long over it, when you ought to be hurrying.

Phyllis and I (Phil is my stepsister, though she is the most English creature alive) have no proper bath-room in our flat. What can you expect for forty pounds a year, even at Clapham? But we have a fitted-up arrangement in the box-room, and it has never exploded yet. Phyllis allows herself ten minutes for her bath every morning, just as she allows herself five minutes for her prayers, six to do her hair, and four for everything else, except when she wears laced-up boots; but then, she has principles, and I have none; at least, I have no maxims. And this morning, just because there were lots of things to do, I was luxuriating in the tub, thinking cool, delicious thoughts.

As a general rule, when you paint glorious pictures for yourself of your future as you would like it to be, it clouds your existence with gray afterwards, because the reality is duller by contrast; but it was different this morning. I had stopped awake all night thinking the same things, and I was no more tired of the thoughts now than when I first began.

I lay with my eyes shut, sniffing Eau de Cologne (I'd poured in a bottleful for a kind of libation, because I could afford to be extravagant), and planning what a delightful future we would have.

"I should love to chop up Phil's type-writer and burn the remains," I said to myself; "but she's much more likely to put it away in lavender, or give it to the next-door-girl with the snub nose. Anyhow, I shall never have to write another serial story for Queen-Woman, or The Fireside Lamp, or any of the other horrors. Oh the joy of not being forced to create villains, only to crush them in the end! No more secret doors and coiners' dens, and unnaturally beautiful dressmakers' assistants for me! Instead of doing typing at ninepence a thousand words Phil can embroider things for curates, and instead of peopling the world with prigs and puppets at a guinea a thou', I can—oh, I can do anything. I don't know what I shall want to do most, and that's the best of it—just to know I can do it. We'll have a beautiful house in a nice part of town, a cottage by the river, and, best of all, we can travel—travel—travel."

Then I began to furnish the cottage and the house, and was putting up a purple curtain in a white marble bath-room with steps down to the bath, when a knock came at the door.

I knew it was Phil, for it could be nobody else; but it was as unlike Phil as possible—as unlike her as a mountain is unlike itself when it is having an eruption.

"Nell," she called outside the door. "Nell, darling! Are you ready?"

"Only just begun," I answered. "I shall be—oh, minutes and minutes yet. Why?"

"I don't want to worry you," replied Phil's creamy voice, with just a little of the cream skimmed off; "but—do make haste."

"Have you been cooking something nice for breakfast?" (Our usual meal is Quaker oats, with milk; and tea, of course; Phil would think it sacrilegious to begin the day on any other drink.)

"Yes, I have. And it's wasted."

"Have you spilt—or burnt it?"

"No; but there's nothing to rejoice over or celebrate, after all; at least, comparatively nothing."

"Good gracious! What do you mean?" I shrieked, with my card-house beginning to collapse, while the Eau de Cologne lost its savor in my nostrils. "Has a codicil been found to Captain Noble's will, as in the last number of my serial for——"

"No; but the post's come, with a letter from his solicitor. Oh, how stupid we were to believe what Mrs. Keithley wrote—just silly gossip. We ought to have remembered that she couldn't know; and she never got a story straight, anyway. Do hurry and come out."

"I've lost the soap now. Everything invariably goes wrong at once. I can't get hold of it. I shall probably be in this bath all the rest of my life. For goodness' sake, what does the lawyer man say?"

"I can't stand here yelling such things at the top of my lungs."

Then I knew how dreadfully poor Phil was really upset, for her lovely voice was quite snappy; and I've always thought she would not snap on the rack or in boiling oil. As for me, my bath began to feel like that—boiling oil, I mean; and I splashed about anyhow, not caring whether I got my hair wet or not. Because, if we had to go on being poor after our great expectations, nothing could possibly matter, not even looking like a drowned rat.

I hadn't the spirit to coax Phyllis, but I might have known she wouldn't go away, really. When I didn't answer except by splashes which might have been sobs, she went on, her mouth apparently at the crack of the door——

"I suppose we ought to be thankful for such mercies as have been granted; but after what we'd been led to expect——"

"What mercies, as a matter of fact, remain to us?" I asked, trying to restore depressed spirits as well as circulation with a towel as harsh as fate.

"Two hundred pounds and a motor-boat."

"A motor-boat? For goodness' sake!"

"Yes. The pounds are for me, the boat for you. It seems you once unfortunately wrote a postcard, and told poor dear Captain Noble you envied him having it. It's said to be as good as new; so there's one comfort, you can sell it second-hand, and perhaps get as much money as he has left me."

I came very near falling down again in the bath with an awful splash, beneath the crushing weight of disappointment, and the soap slipping under my foot.

"Two hundred pounds and a motor-boat—instead of all those thousands!" I groaned—not very loudly; but Phil heard me through the door.

"Never mind, dearest," she called, striving, in that irritating way saints have, to be cheerful in spite of all. "It's better than nothing. We can invest it."

"Invest it!" I screamed. "What are two hundred pounds and a motor-boat when invested?"

Evidently she was doing a sum in mental arithmetic. After a few seconds' silence she answered bravely——

"About twelve pounds a year."

"Hang twelve pounds a year!" I shrieked. Then something odd seemed to happen in my inner workings. My blood gave a jump and flew up to my head, where I could hear it singing—a wild, excited song. Perhaps it was the Eau de Cologne, and not being used to it in my bath, which made me feel like that. "I shan't invest my motor-boat," I said. "I'm going a cruise in it, and so are you."

"My darling girl, I hope you haven't gone out of your mind from the blow!" There was alarm and solicitude in Phil's accents. "When you've slipped on your dressing-gown and come out we'll talk things over."

"Nothing can make me change my mind," I answered. "It's been made up a whole minute. Everything is clear now. Providence has put a motor-boat into our hands as a means of seeing life, and to console us for not being Captain Noble's heiresses, as Mrs. Keithley wrote we were going to be. I will not fly in Providence's face. I haven't been brought up to it by you. We are going to have the time of our lives with that motor-boat."

The door shook with Phil's disapproval. "You do talk like an American," she flung at me through the panel.

"That's good. I'm glad adoption hasn't ruined me," I retorted. "But could you—just because you're English—contentedly give up our beautiful plans, and settle down as if nothing had happened—with your type-writer?"

"I hope I have the strength of mind to bear it," faltered Phyllis. "We've only had two days of hoping for better things."

"We've only lived for two days. There's no going back; there can't be. We've burned our ships behind us, and must take to the motor-boat."

"Dearest, I don't think this is a proper time for joking—and you in your bath, too," protested Phil, mildly.

"I'm out of it now. But I refuse to be out of everything. Miss Phyllis Rivers—why, your very name's a prophecy!—I formally invite you to take a trip with me in my motor-boat. It may cost us half, if not more, of your part of the legacy; but I will merely borrow from you the wherewithal to pay our expenses. Somehow—afterwards—I'll pay it back, even if I have to reëstablish communication with heavenly shop-girls and villainous duchesses. Oh, Phil, we'll get some fun out of this, after all. Anyhow, we shall go on living—for a few weeks. What matter if, after that, the deluge?"

"You speak exactly as if you were planning to be an adventuress," said Phyllis, coldly.

"I should love to be one," said I. "I've always thought it must be more fun than anything—till the last chapter. We'll both embark—in the motor-boat—on a brief but bright career as adventuresses."

With that, before she could give me an answer, I opened the door and walked out in my dressing-gown, so suddenly that she almost pitched forward into the bath. Phyllis, heard from behind a cold, unsympathetic door, and Phyllis seen in all her virginal Burne-Jones attractiveness, might as well be two different girls. If you carried on a conversation with Miss Rivers on ethics and conventionalities and curates, and things of that kind from behind a door, without having first peeped round to see what she was like, you would do the real Phil an injustice.

There is nothing pink and soft and dimpled about Phyllis's views of life (or, at least, what she supposes her views to be); but about Phyllis in flesh and blood there is more of that than anything else; which is one reason why she has been a constant fountain of joy to my heart as well as my sense of humor, ever since her clever Herefordshire father married my pretty Kentucky mother.

Phil would like, if published, to be a Sunday-school book, and a volume of "Good Form for High Society" rolled into one; but she is really more like a treatise on flower-gardens, and a recipe for making Devonshire junket with clotted cream.

Not that she's a regular beauty, or that she goes in for any speciality by way of features or eyelashes, or hair, or a figure, or anything really sensational of that sort, as I do in one or two directions. But there's a rose and pearl and gold-brown adorableness about her; you like her all the better for some little puritanical quaintnesses; and if you are an Englishman or an American girl, you long to bully her.

She is taller than I am (as she ought to be, with Burne-Jones nose and eyes), but this morning, when I sprang at her out of the bath-room, like a young tigress escaped from its cage on its ruthless way to a motor-boat, she looked so piteous and yielding, that I felt I could carry her—and my point at the same time—half across the world.

She had made cream eggs for breakfast, poor darling (I could have sobbed on them), and actually coffee for me, because she knows I love it. I didn't worry her any more until an egg and a cup of tea were on duty to keep her strength up, and then I poured plans, which I made as I went on, upon her meekly protesting head.

The boat, it appeared, lay in Holland, which fact, as I pointed out to Phil, was another sign that Providence had set its heart upon our using her; for we've always wanted to see Holland. We often said, if we ever took a holiday from serials and the type-writer, we would go to Holland; but somehow the time for holidays and Holland never seemed to arrive. Now, here it was; and it would be the time of our lives.

Poor Captain Noble meant to use the boat himself this summer, but he was taken ill late in the season on the Riviera and died there. It was from Mentone that Mrs. Keithley wrote what was being said among his friends about a huge legacy for us; and we, poor deluded ones, had believed.

Captain Noble, a dear old retired naval officer, was a friend of Phyllis's father since the beginning of the world, and, though Phil was sixteen and I fifteen when our respective parents (widowed both, ages before) met and married, the good man took my mother also to his heart. Phil and I have been alone in the world together now for three years; she is twenty-two, I twenty-one. Though many moons have passed since we saw anything of Captain Noble except picture postcards, we were not taken entirely by surprise when we heard that he had left us a large legacy. It is easy to get used to nice things, and far more difficult to crawl down gracefully from gilded heights.

Crawl we must, however; so I determined it should be into that motor-boat floating idly on a canal in Holland.

The letter from the solicitor (a French solicitor, or the equivalent, writing from the Riviera) told us all about the boat and about the money. The boat must be got by going or sending to Rotterdam, the money obtained in London.

A thirty horse-power (why not thirty dolphin-power?) motor-boat sounds very grand to read about; and as I recovered from my first disappointment I began to feel as if I'd suddenly become proprietor of a whole circus full of champing steeds. I tried to persuade Phyllis that I should write better stories if I could travel a little in my own motor-boat, as it would broaden my mind; therefore it would pay in the end. Besides, I wasn't sure my health was not breaking down from overstrain; not only that, I felt it would be right to go; and, anyhow, I just would go—so there.

I argued till I was on the point of fainting or having a fit, and I've no doubt that it was my drawn face (what face wouldn't have been drawn?) to which Phil's soft heart and obstinate mind finally succumbed.

She said that, as I seemed determined to go through fire and water (I never heard of any hot springs in the canals of Holland), she supposed she would have to stick by me, for she was older than I and couldn't allow me to go alone under any consideration, especially with my coloring and hair. But, though experience of me had accustomed her to shocks and, she must confess, to sacrifices, she had never expected until now that she would be called upon for my sake to become an adventuress.

As for the two hundred pounds, that part didn't signify. I needn't suppose she was thinking of it; thank Heaven, whether we worked or were idle we would still have our settled hundred and twenty pounds a year each. It was our reputation for which she cared most, and she was sure the least evil that could befall us would be to blow up.

"Better do it on a grand scale in a thirty horse-power motor-boat than in a gas-meter bath-tub of a five-room flat in Clapham," I remarked; and somehow that silenced Phyllis, except for a sigh.

Since then I've been in a whirl of excitement preparing my watery path as a motor-boat adventuress, and buying a dress or two to suit the part. It doesn't even depress me that Phil has selected hers with the air of acquiring a serviceable shroud.

I've finished up three serials in as many days, killing off my villains like flies, and creating a perfect epidemic of hastily made matches among titled heroes and virtuous nursery governesses. Scarcely an aristocratic house in England that wouldn't shake to its foundations if fiction were fact; but then my fiction isn't of the kind that anything short of a dislocated universe could possibly make fact.

Phyllis, with the face of a tragic Muse, has been writing letters to her clients recommending another typist—quite a professional sort of person, who was her understudy once, a year or so ago, when she thoughtlessly allowed herself to come down with measles.

"Miss Brown never puts 'q' instead of 'a', or gets chapter titles on one side; and she knows how to make the loveliest curlicues under her headings. Nobody will ever want me to come back," the poor girl wailed.

"All the better for them, if you're going to blow up, as you are convinced you will," I strove to console her, as I tried on a yachting-cap, reduced to two three-farthings from four shillings. But she merely shuddered. And now, when at last we have shut up the flat, turned the key upon our pasts, and got irrevocably on board the "Batavier" boat, which will land us in Rotterdam, she has moaned more than once, "I feel as if nothing would be the same with us ever, ever again."

"So do I," I've answered unfeelingly. "And I'm glad."

II

This is the first time I have been on a sea-going ship since I crossed from America with my mother, neither of us dreaming that she would settle down and give me an Englishman for a stepfather. As for Phil, she has no memories outside her native land—except early ones of Paris—and, though she has a natural instinct for the preservation of her young life, I don't doubt that every motion of the big boat in the night made her realize how infinitely more decorous it would be to drown on the "Batavier 4" than in a newfangled motor thing on an obscure foreign canal.

The Thames we have seen before, in all its bigness and richness and black ugliness; for on hot summer days we have embarked on certain trips which would condemn us forever in the eyes of duchesses, countesses, and other ladies of title I have known serially, in instalments. But we (or rather, I) chose to reach Holland by water, as it seems a more appropriate preface to our adventure; and I got Phyllis up before five in the morning, not to miss by any chance the first sight of the Low Lands.

We were only just in time, for we hadn't had our coffee and been dressed many minutes before my eyes caught at a line of land as a drowning person is supposed to catch at a straw.

"Holland!" said I; which was not particularly intelligent in me, as it couldn't have been anything else.

There it lay, this stage set for our drama, comedy, tragedy—whatever it may prove—of which we don't yet know the plot, although we are the heroines; and now that I'm writing in a Rotterdam hotel the curtain may be said to have rung up on the first act.

Just then it was lifted only far enough to show a long, low waste of gray-green, with a tuft or two of trees and a few shadowy individuals, which the stage-hands had evidently set in motion for the benefit of the leading ladies.

"We might be the Two Orphans," I said, "only you're not blind, Phil—except in your sense of humor; and I'm afraid there are no wicked Dutch noblemen to kidnap me——"

"Oh dear, I'm sure I hope not!" exclaimed Phil, looking as if a new feather had been heaped on her load of anxieties.

The line was no longer gray now, nor was it a waste. It was a bright green, floating ribbon, brocaded with red flowers; and soon it was no ribbon, but a stretch of grassy meadow, and the red flowers were roofs; yet meadows and roofs were not just common meadows and roofs, for they belonged to Holland; and everybody knows—even those who haven't seen it yet—that Holland is like no country in the world, except its queer, cozy, courageous, obstinate little self.

The sky was blue to welcome us, and housewifely Dutch angels were beating up the fat, white cloud-pillows before tucking them under the horizon out of sight. Even the air seemed to have been washed till it glittered with crystalline clearness that brought each feature of the landscape strangely close to the eyes.

We were in the River Maas, which opened its laughing mouth wide to let in our boat. But soon it was so busy with its daily toil that it forgot to smile and look its best for strangers. We saw it in its brown working-dress, giving water to ugly manufactories, and floating an army of big ships, black lighters, and broadly built craft, which coughed spasmodically as they forged sturdily and swiftly through the waters. Their breath was like the whiff that comes from an automobile, and I knew that they must be motor-barges. My heart warmed to them. They seemed to have been sent out on purpose to say, "Your fun is going to begin."

At last we were in Rotterdam, steaming slowly between two lines of dignified quays, ornamented with rows of trees and backed by quaintly built, many-colored brick houses—blue and green and pink, some nodding forward, some leaning back. The front walls were carried up to conceal the roofs; many of the façades tapered into triangles; others had double curves like a swan's neck; some were cut into steps—so that there was great variety, and an effect almost Chinese about the architecture of the queer houses with the cranes projecting over their topmost windows. There was nothing to be called beautiful, but it was all impressive and interesting, because so different from that part of the world which we know.

A gigantic railway bridge of latticed iron flung itself across the skyline; one huge white building, like a New York sky-scraper, towered head and shoulders above the close-leaning roofs of the city; and all among the houses were brown sails and masts of ships; water-streets and land-streets tangled inseparably together.

The hum of life—strange, foreign life!—filled the air; an indescribable, exciting sound, made up of the wind whistling among cordage of sea-going ships, the shouts of men at work, the river slapping against piles and the iron sides of vessels, the whirr and clank of steam-cranes. Wreaths of brown smoke blew gustily in the sunlight; a train boomed across the latticed bridge; and the hoot of a siren tore all other sounds in shreds. Creakily our ship was warped in by straining cables, and I said to myself, "The overture's finished. The play is going to begin."

Phil and I streamed off the boat with the other passengers, who had the air of knowing exactly why they'd come, where they were going, and what was the proper thing to do next. But as soon as we were landed on the most extraordinary place, which looked as if trees and houses had sprouted on a dyke, all consecutive ideas were ground out of our heads in the mill of confusing sights and sounds. Friends were meeting each other, and jabbering something which sounded at a distance like Glasgow-English, and like no known language when you were close enough to catch the words. Porters surged round us, urging the claims of rival hotels; men in indigo cotton blouses pleaded for our luggage; and altogether we were overwhelmed by a tidal wave of Dutchness.

How order finally came out of chaos I hardly know; but when I got my breath it occurred to me that we might temporarily abandon our big luggage and steer through the crowd, with dressing-bags in our hands, to hail an elderly cab whose driver had early selected us as prey.

Before getting into the vehicle I paused, and tried to concentrate my mind on plans; though the quaint picture of the Boompjes, and the thought that we, Phyllis Rivers and Nell Van Buren, should be on the Boompjes was distracting. I did manage, however, to find our boat's address and the name of the caretaker, both of which I had on a piece of paper with loose "i's" and "j's" scattered thickly through every word. All we had to do, therefore, was to tell our moth-eaten cabman to drive to the place, show the letters from the solicitor (and perhaps a copy of Captain Noble's will), claim our property from the hands of Jan Paasma, and then, if we liked, take up our quarters on our own boat until we could engage some one to "work it" for our tour. Luckily, we'd had coffee and rolls on board the "Batavier"; so we needn't bother about breakfast, as I said joyously to Phil.

But Phil, it seemed, did not regard breakfast as a bother. She thought it would be fatal to throw ourselves into a formidable undertaking unless we first had tea and an egg, and somebody to advise us.

"We must go to an hotel before we see the boat," said she, firmly.

"But who's to give us advice at a hotel?" I asked with scorn.

"Oh, I don't know. The manager."

"Managers of hotels aren't engaged to advise young women about motor-boats."

"Well, then, a—a waiter."

"A waiter!"

"We could ask the head one. And, anyway, he would be a man."

"My darling child, have we ever depended on a man since your father died?"

"We've never had emergencies, except taking our flat—oh, and buying my type-writer. Besides, I can't bear all I shall have to bear without a cup of tea."

This settled it. We climbed into that frail shell, our chosen cab, and I opened the Dutch phrase-book which I bought in London. I wanted to find out what hotel was nearest to the lair of our boat, but in that wild moment I could discover nothing more appropriate than "I wish immediately some medicine for seasickness," and (hastily turning over the pages) "I have lost my pet cat." I began mechanically to stammer French and the few words of German which for years have lain peacefully buried in the dustiest folds of my intellect.

"Oh, dear, how shall I make him understand what we want?" I groaned, my nerves quivering under the pitying eye of the cabman, and the early-Christian-martyr expression of Phyllis.

"Don't ask me," said she, in icy vengefulness; "you would bring me to Holland, and I shouldn't speak Dutch if I could."

"I spik Eengleesh," announced the cabman.

I could have fallen upon his bosom, which, though littered with dust and grease-spots, I was sure concealed a noble heart. But I contented myself with taking him into my confidence. I said we had a motor-boat, and wanted to go to a hotel as near it as possible. I then showed the precious paper with the "i's" and "j's" dotted about, and he nodded so much that his tall hat, which looked like a bit cut out of a rusty stove-pipe, almost fell off on my nose.

"You get on my carriage, and I drive you to where you want," he replied reassuringly, making of our luggage a resting-place for his honest boots, and climbing into his seat.

Magnetized by his manner, we obeyed, and it was not until we had started, rattling over the stone-paved street, that Phil bethought herself of an important detail.

"Wait a moment. Ask him if it's a nice hotel where he's taking us."

I stood up, seized the railing of the driver's seat to steady myself, and shrieked the question above the noise of the wheels.

"I take you right place," he returned; and I repeated the sentence to Phyllis.

"That's no answer. Ask him if it's respectable; we can't go if it isn't. Ask him if it's expensive; we can't go if it is."

I yelled the message.

"I take you hotel by-and-by. You see Rotterdam a little first."

"But we don't want to see Rotterdam first. We want breakfast. Rotterdam by-and-by."

A sudden bump flung me down onto the hard seat. I half rose to do battle again; then, as I gazed up at that implacable Dutch back, I began dimly to understand how Holland, though a dot of a nation, tired out and defeated fiery Spain. I knew that no good would be accomplished by resisting that back. Short of hurling ourselves out on the stones, we would have to see Rotterdam, so we might as well make the best of it. And this I urged upon Phil, with reproaches for her niggardliness in not buying Baedeker, who would have put stars to tell us the names of hotels, and given us crisp maps to show where they were situated in connection with other things.

I should think few people who have lived in Rotterdam for years have really seen as much of the town as we saw on this clear blue morning.

At first the information bestowed upon us by the owner of the back seemed an adding of insult to injury. How dared he explain what he was forcing us to see in spite of ourselves? But, by-and-by, even Phyllis fell to laughing, and her dimples are to her temper what rainbows are to thunder-showers—once they are out there can be no more storm.

"I feel as if we'd seen samples of all Holland, and were ready to go to our peaceful home again," said Phil, after we'd driven about from the region of big shops and imposing arcades, to shady streets mirroring brown mansions in glassy canals; on to toy villages of miniature painted houses, standing in flowery gardens, far below the level of adjacent ponds adorned with flower-islands; through large parks and intricate plantations; past solemnly flapping windmills; far beyond, to meadows where black and white cows recognized the fact that we were not Dutch and despised us for it; then back to parks and gardens again. "I shouldn't think there could be any sort of characteristic thing left which we haven't met with. I'm sure I could go home now and talk intelligently about Holland."

We couldn't help being interested in everything, though we were seeing it against our wills; yet it was a relief to our feelings when the Back unbent to the extent of stopping before an old-fashioned, low-built hotel, close to a park. So far as we could judge, it was miles from anywhere, and had no connection with anything else; but we were too thankful for the privilege of stopping, to be critical. The house had an air of quiet rectitude which appealed to Phil, and without a word she allowed our luggage to be taken off the cab.

When we came to pay, it appeared that our driver hadn't made us acquainted with every secret of Rotterdam, purely in a spirit of generosity. We were called upon to part with almost all the gulden we had got in exchange for shillings on board the boat, and Phil looked volumes as it dawned on her intelligence that each one of these coins (with the head of an incredibly mild and whiskered old gentleman upon it) was worth one and eightpence.

We were called upon to part with almost all the gulden

"At this rate we shall soon be in the poorhouse," she said.

"If it comes to that, we can stop the motor-boat at villages and solicit alms," I suggested.

After all, the Back had had some method in its madness, for on showing the caretaker's address to a giant hall-porter, it appeared that the place was within ten minutes' walk of the hotel. We refused to decide upon rooms until our future plans had shaped themselves; and our luggage reposed in the hall while we had cups of tea and a Dutch conception of toast in a garden, whose charms we shared with a rakish wandering Jew of a tortoise.

Many times since I induced Phyllis to join me in becoming an adventuress, have we vaguely arranged what we would do on arriving at Rotterdam. The program seemed simple enough from a distance—just to go and pick up our boat (so to speak) and motor away with it; but when we actually started off, pioneered by a small boy from the hotel, to take possession of our property, I had a horrid sinking of the heart, which I wouldn't for many heads of whiskered old gentlemen on gulden have confessed to Phil. I felt that "something was going to happen."

The "ten minutes'" walk prolonged itself into twenty, and then there was a ferry over a wide, brown, swift-flowing stream. This brought us to a little basin opening from the river, where one or two small yachts and other craft nestled together.

"Look!" I exclaimed, with a sudden throb of excitement, which bubbled up like a geyser through the cold crust of my depression. "There she is!"

"Who?" cried Phyllis, starting. "Any one we know?"

"Our boat, silly. 'Lorelei.' I suppose you think she ought to be called 'White Elephant'?"

Yes, there she was, with "Lorelei" in gold letters on her bows, this fair siren who had lured us across the North Sea; and instead of being covered up and shabby to look at after her long winter of retirement and neglect, she had the air of being ready to start off at a moment's notice to begin a cruise.

Every detail of her smart white dress looked new. There was no fear of delay for painting and patching. Clean cocoa-nut matting was spread upon the floor of the little decks fore and aft; the brass rails dazzled our eyes with their brilliance; the windows of the roofed cabin were brighter than the Ko-hi-nur, the day I went to see it in the Tower of London; basket-chairs, with pink and blue and primrose silk cushions, stood on deck, their arms open in a welcoming gesture. There was a little table, too, which looked born and bred for a tea-table. It really was extraordinary.

"Oh, Nell, it is a pretty boat!" The words were torn from Phil in reluctant admiration. "Of course it's most awfully reckless of us to have come, and I don't see what's going to happen in the end; but—but it does seem as if we might enjoy ourselves. Fancy having tea on our own deck! Why, it's almost a yacht! I wonder what Lady Hutchinson would say if she could see us sitting in those chairs! She'd be polite to me for a whole month."

Lady Hutchinson is Phil's one titled client. Long ago her husband was a grocer. She writes sentimental poetry, and her idea of dignity is to snub her type-writer. But I couldn't concentrate my mind on the pleasure of astonishing Lady Hutchinson. I was thinking what a wonderful caretaker Jan Paasma must be.

"Conscientious" hardly expressed him, because it's almost a year since Captain Noble used "Lorelei," and we hadn't written that we were coming to claim her; yet here she was, en fête for our reception. But then, I thought, perhaps our dear old friend had left instructions to keep the boat always ready. It would be rather like him: and, in any case, we should soon know all, as Mr. Paasma's dwelling is a little green house close to the miniature quay. We saw his name over the door, for evidently he doesn't entirely depend upon his guardianship of boats for a livelihood. He owns a shop, with indescribable things in the one cramped but shining window—things which only those who go down to the sea in ships could possibly wish to have.

For all we could tell he might be on board the boat, which floated a yard or two from shore, moored by ropes; but it seemed more professional to seek Mr. Paasma under his own roof, and we did so, nearly falling over a stout child who was scrubbing the floor of the shop.

"What a queer time of day to be cleaning—eleven o'clock," muttered Phil, having just saved herself from a tumble. I thought so too; but then we'd been in Holland only a few hours. We hadn't yet realized the relative importance of certain affairs of life, according to a Dutchwoman's point of view.

We glared reproachfully at the stout child, as much as to say, "Why don't you finish your swabbing at a proper hour?" She glared at us as if she would have demanded, "What the (Dutch) Dickens do you mean by bouncing in and upsetting my arrangements?"

Little was accomplished on either side by this skirmishing; so I put my pride in my pocket and inquired for her master.

"Boot," replied the creature. "Boot," pointing with her mop in the direction whence we had come.

We understood by this that the caretaker was at his post, and we returned to shout the name of Heer Paasma.

Nothing happened at first; but after several spasmodic repetitions a blue silk curtain flickered at one of the cabin windows on "Lorelei," and a little, old, brown face, with a fringe of fluff round the chin, appeared in the aperture—a walnut of a face, with a pair of shrewd, twinkling eyes, and a pipe in a slit of a mouth. Another call brought on deck a figure which matched the face; and on deck Mr. Paasma (it looked like a gnome, but it could be no other than the caretaker) evidently intended to remain until he got a satisfactory explanation.

III

"Are you Heer Paasma?" I inquired from my distance.

The walnut nodded.

"Do you speak English?"

Out came the pipe. "Ja, a leetle."

"We're Miss Rivers and Miss Van Buren, from England. I'm Miss Van Buren. You have heard about me, and that Captain Noble left me his motor-boat in his will."

"No, I not heerd." A dark flush slowly turned the sharp little walnut face to mahogany.

"How strange! I thought the solicitor would have written. But perhaps it wasn't necessary. Anyway, I have all the papers to prove that the boat is mine. You did know poor Captain Noble was dead, surely?"

"Ja, I hear that."

"Well, if you'll put a plank across, we'll come on board, and I'll show you my papers and explain everything."

"I come on shore," said Mr. Paasma.

"No, we would rather——"

I might have saved my breath. Mr. Paasma was Dutch, and he had made up his mind what would be best. The rest goes without saying. He seized one of the ropes, hauled the boat closer to shore, and sprang onto the bank.

There was a strange glitter in his eye. I supposed it to be the bleak glint of suspicion, and hastened to reassure the excellent man by producing my papers, pointing out paragraphs which I placed conspicuously under his nose, in our copy of Captain Noble's will, and the letters I had received from the solicitor.

"You see," I said at last, "everything is all right. You need have no hesitation in giving the boat to me."

"You need have no hesitation in giving the boat to me"

Mr. Paasma puffed at his pipe, which he held very tight between his teeth, and stared at the papers without looking up.

"If you like, you can apply to your lawyer, if you have one," I went on, seeing that he was far from easy in his mind. "I'm quite willing to meet him. Besides"—I had suddenly a brilliant idea—"I have relations in Rotterdam. Their name is the same as mine—van Buren. Perhaps you have heard of Heer Robert van Buren?"

"Ja," replied Mr. Paasma, biting his pipe still harder. Instead of looking happy, his face grew so troubled that I wondered whether my mention of these unknown relatives had been unfortunate—whether, by any chance, a member of the family had lately committed some crime. Meanwhile, Phyllis stared. For my own reasons I had refrained from speaking to her of these relations; now, urged by necessity, I brought them to light; but what they might be, or whether they still existed in Rotterdam I knew no more than did Phil.

"Mynheer van Buren is a known man," said the caretaker. "You not send for him. I think the boat is to you, missus. What you want do?"

"First of all, we want to go on board and look at her," I replied.

This time, rather to my surprise, he made no objections. A dark pall of resignation had fallen upon him. In such a mood as his, an Indian woman would go to Suttee without a qualm. He pulled the boat to shore, placed a plank, and with a thrilling pride of possession we walked on board.

There were some steep steps which led down from the deck to the cabin, and Phyllis and I descended, Mr. Paasma stolidly following, with an extraordinary expression on his walnut face. It was not exactly despairing, or defiant, or angry, or puzzled; but it held something of each one of these emotions.

However, I soon forgot about the caretaker and his feelings in admiration of "Lorelei." Aft, you looked down into the motor-room, with a big monster of machinery, which I respected but didn't understand. From that, when you'd crossed a little passage, you had to go down some more steps into a cabin which was so charming that I stood still on the threshold, and said, "Oh!"

"Why, it's prettier than our drawing-room!" exclaimed Phil; "and my favorite colors too, green and white. It's almost like a boudoir. Who could have supposed Captain Noble would have so much taste? And do look at that darling old Dutch clock over the—the buffet or whatever it is, with all the little ships rocking on the waves every time it ticks."

We were both so much excited now that we began to talk together, neither of us listening to the other. We opened the door of what Phil called the "buffet," and found neat little piles of blue-and-white china. There were tiny tablecloths and napkins too, and knives and forks and spoons. On one of the seats (which could be turned into berths at night) stood a smart tea-basket. We peeped inside, and it was the nicest tea-basket imaginable, which must have come from some grand shop in Bond Street, with its gold and white cups, and its gleaming nickel and silver. In the locker were sheets and blankets; on a bracket by the clock was a book-shelf with glass doors, and attractive-looking novels inside.

"How pathetic it is!" I cried. "Poor Captain Noble! He must have enjoyed getting together these nice things; and now they are all for us."

"And here—oh, this is too sad! His poor, dear shirts and things," sighed Phil, making further discoveries in another, smaller cabin beyond. "Drawers full of them. Fancy his leaving them here all winter—and they don't seem a bit damp."

I followed her into a green-and-pink cabin, a tiny den, but pretty enough for an artist instead of an old retired sea-captain.

"What shall we do with them?" she asked. "We might keep them all to remember him by, perhaps; only—they would be such odd sorts of souvenirs for girls to have, and—oh, my goodness, Nell, who could have dreamed of Captain Noble in—in whatever it is?"

Whatever it was, it was pale-blue silk, with lovely pink stripes of several shades, and there was a jacket which Phil was just holding out by its shoulders, to admire, when a slight cough made us turn our heads.

It is strange what individuality there can be in a cough. We would have sworn if we'd heard it while locked up with Mr. Paasma in a dark cell, where there was no other human being to produce it, that he couldn't have uttered such an interesting cough.

Before we turned, we knew that there was a stranger on "Lorelei," but we were surprised when we saw what sort of stranger he was.

He stood in the narrow doorway between the two cabins, looking at us with bright, dark eyes, like Robert Louis Stevenson's, and dressed in smart flannels and a tall collar, such as Robert Louis Stevenson would never have consented to wear.

"I beg your pardon," said he, in a nice, drawling voice, which told me that he'd first seen the light in one of the Southern States of America.

"I beg yours," said I. (Somehow Phil generally waits for me to speak first in emergencies, though she's a year older.) "Are you looking for any one—the caretaker of our boat, perhaps?"

His eyes traveled from me to Phil; from Phil to the blue garment to which she still clung; from the blue garment to the pile of stiff white shirts in an open drawer.

"No—o, I wasn't exactly looking for any one," he slowly replied. "I just came on board to—er——"

"To what, if you please?" I demanded, beginning to stiffen. "I've a right to know, because this is our boat. If you're a newspaper reporter, or anything of that sort, please go away; but if you have business——"

"No, it was only pleasure," said the young man, his eyes like black diamonds. "I didn't know the boat was yours."

"Whose did you think it was?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, I—er—thought it was mine."

"What do you mean?" I cried, while Phil threw a wild, questioning look at the shirts, and dropped the blue silk jacket.

"That is, temporarily. But there must be some mistake."

"There must—a big mistake. Where's the caretaker? He came on board with us."

The young man's eyes twinkled even more. "Did he know it was your boat?"

"Why, of course, we told him. It was left to us in a will. We've just come to claim it."

"Oh, I think I begin to see. I shouldn't wonder if Paasma has now taken to his bed with a sudden attack of—whatever the Dutch have instead of nervous prostration. He didn't know you were coming?"

"Not till we came."

"It must have been quite a surprise. By Jove, the old fox! I suppose he hadn't got the shadow of a right, then, to let the boat to me?"

"My gracious!" breathed Phyllis, and shut up the drawer of shirts with a snap. I don't know what she did with the blue silk object, except that it suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the floor. Perhaps she stood on it.

"What an awful thing," said I. "You're sure you're not in the wrong boat? You're sure he didn't let you some other one?"

"Sure. There is no other one in Holland exactly like this. I've been on board nearly every day for a week, ever since I began to——"

"Since you began——"

"To have her done up. Nothing to speak of, you know; but she's been lying here all winter, and—er—I had a fancy to clean house——"

"Then—all these things are—yours?"

"Some of the things——"

"The Dutch clock, the deck-chairs, the silk cushions, the curtains, and decorations in the cabin——"

"I'm afraid you think I'm an awful meddler; but, you see, I didn't know. Paasma told me he had a right to let the boat, and that I could do her up as much as I liked."

"The old wretch!" I gasped. "And you walk on board to find two strange girls rummaging among your—your——" Then I couldn't help laughing when I remembered how Phil had suggested our keeping those things for souvenirs.

"I thought I must be having a dream—a beautiful dream."

I ignored the implied compliment. "What are we going to do about it?" I asked. "It is our boat. There's no doubt about that. But with these things of yours—do you want to go to law, or—or—anything?"

"Good heavens, no! I——"

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said I. "Let's get the caretaker here, and have it out with him. Perhaps he has an explanation."

"He's certain to have—several. Shall I go and fetch him?"

"Please do," urged Phil, speaking for the first time, and looking adorably pink.

The young man vanished, and we heard him running up the steep companion (if that's the right word for it) two steps at a time.

Phil and I stared at each other. "I knew something awful would happen," said she. "This is a judgment."

"He's too nice looking to be a judgment," said I. "I like his taste in everything—including shirts, don't you?"

"Don't speak of them," commanded Phil.

We shut the drawers tightly, and going into the other cabin, did the same there.

"Anyhow, I saw 'C. Noble' on the sheets and blankets," I said thankfully. "There are some things that belong to us."

"It will end in our going home at once, I suppose," said Phil.

"However else it ends, it won't end like that, I promise you," I assured her. "I must have justice."

"But he must have his things. Oh, Nell, have you really got relatives in Rotterdam, or did you make that up to frighten the caretaker?"

"No; they exist. I never spoke of them to you, because I never thought of them until we were coming here, and then I was afraid if I did you'd think it the proper thing to implore the females—if any—to chaperon us. Besides, relations so often turn out bores. All I know about mine is, that mother told me father had relations in Holland—in Rotterdam. And if she and I hadn't stopped in England to take care of you and your father, perhaps we should have come here and met them long ago."

"Well, do let's look them up and get them to help. I won't say a word about chaperons."

"Perhaps it would be a good thing. That wicked old caretaker seemed to be struck with respectful awe by the name of Van Buren."

"I never knew before that you were partly Dutch."

"You did. I've often boasted of my Knickerbocker blood."

"Yes. But——"

"Didn't you know it was the same thing? Where's your knowledge of history?"

"I never had much time to study American history. There was such a lot that came before," said Phil, mildly; but the blood sprang to her cheeks at the sound of a step on the stairs. Our rival for possession of the boat had come back alone.

"That old rascal has, with extraordinary suddenness and opportuneness, forgotten every word of English," he announced, "and pretends not to understand German. I can't speak Dutch; can you?"

"No," said I. "Not a syllable. But he spoke English quite respectably an hour ago."

"That was before he was found out. He can now do nothing but shake his head and say 'niets verstaen,' or something that sounds like that. I thought of killing him, but concluded it would be better to wait until I'd asked you how you'd like it done."

"It ought to be something lingering," said I. "We'll talk it over. But first, perhaps, we'd better decide what's to be done with ourselves. You see, we've come to Holland to have a cruise on our new boat; otherwise, if you liked, we, as the real owners, might let her to you, and all would be well. Still, it does seem a shame that you should be disappointed when you took 'Lorelei' in good faith, and made her so pretty. Of course, you must let us know what you've paid——"

"A few gulden," said the young man, evasively.

"Never mind. You must tell how many. Unfortunately that won't mend your disappointment. But—what can we do?"

"I suppose there isn't the slightest hope that you could—er—take me as a passenger?"

"Oh, we couldn't possibly do that," hastily exclaimed Phil. "We're alone. Though my stepsister, Miss Van Buren, has cousins in Rotterdam, we've come from England without a chaperon, and—for the present——"

The young man's eyes were more brilliant than ever, though the rest of his face looked sad.

"Oh, don't say any more," he implored. "I see how it is. I oughtn't to have made such a suggestion. My only excuse is, I was thinking—of my poor aunt. She'll be horribly disappointed. I care most for her, and what she'll feel at giving up the cruise."

"Oh, was your aunt coming?" I asked.

"Yes, my Scotch aunt. Such a charming woman. I'm an American, you know. Clever of me to have a Scotch aunt, but I have. I've been visiting her lately, near Edinburgh. You would like Lady MacNairne, I think."

Phil's face changed. She is the last girl in the world to be a snob; but hearing that this young man had a Scotch aunt, with a title, was almost as good as a proper introduction. And there really is something singularly winning about my countryman. I suppose it is that he has "a way with him," as the Irish say. Besides, it seemed nice of so young a man to care so much about a mere aunt. Many young men despise aunts as companions; but evidently he isn't one of those, as he beautified "Lorelei" simply to give his aunt pleasure.

"It really does seem hard," I said. "Now, if only Phyllis hadn't so many rules of propriety—" But, to my surprise, the very thought in my mind, which I hadn't dared breathe, was spoken out next minute by Phil herself.

"Maybe we might come to some kind of arrangement—as you have an aunt," she faltered.

"Yes, as you have an aunt," I repeated.

"She'd make an ideal chaperon for young ladies," hastily went on the Southerner. "I should like you to meet her."

"Is Lady MacNairne in Rotterdam?" asked Phil.

"Not exactly; but she's coming—almost at once."

"We don't know your name yet," said Phyllis. "I'm Miss Rivers; my stepsister is Miss Van Buren. Perhaps you'd better introduce yourself."

"I shall be glad to," returned my countryman. "My name is Ronald Lester Starr——"

"Why, the initials are just right—R. L. S." I murmured.

"I know what you mean," he said, with a nice smile. "They say I look like him. I'm very proud. You'll think I ought to be a writer; but I'm not. I paint a little—just enough to call myself an artist——"

"Oh, I remember," I broke in. "I thought the name sounded familiar. You had a picture in the Salon this spring."

He looked anxious. "Did you see it?"

"No—not even a copy. What was the subject? Horrid of me to ask; but, you see, it's July now, and one forgets."

"One does," he admitted, as if he were pleased. "Oh, it was only a portrait of my aunt."

"Your Scotch aunt?"

"Yes. But if you'd seen it, and then should see her, you mightn't even recognize her. I—er—didn't try to make a striking likeness."

"I wish I'd seen the picture," said I. And I thought Mr. Starr must be very modest, for his expression suggested that he didn't echo my wish.

"Do you think you could let my aunt and me join you?" he asked. "I don't mean to crowd up your boat; that would never do, for you might want to sleep on it sometimes. But I might get a barge, and you could tow it. I'd thought of that very thing; indeed, I've practically engaged a barge. My friend and I, who were to have chummed together, if he hadn't been called away—oh, you know, that was a plan before my aunt promised to come, quite another idea. But what I mean to say is, I got an idea for hiring a barge, and having it towed by the motor-boat. I could have had a studio in that way, for I wanted to do some painting. I'd just come back from seeing rather a jolly barge that's to let, when I—er—stumbled on you."

"Had you engaged any one to work 'Lorelei'?"

"A chauffeur," said Mr. Ronald; "but no skipper for certain yet. I've been negotiating."

"Dear me!" I exclaimed. "Must we have a chauffeur and a skipper too?"

"I'm afraid we must; a man who understands the waterways of Holland. A chauffeur understands only the motor, and lucky if he does that."

"Won't it be dreadfully expensive?" asked Phyllis.

"The skipper's wages won't be more than five or six dollars (a bit more than one of your sovereigns) a week, and the chauffeur less. They'll keep themselves, but I meant them to sleep on the barge. The skipper ought to be a smart chap, who can be trusted with money to pay the expenses of the boat as one goes along—bridge-money and all sorts of things. The chauffeur can buy the essence—petrol, you call it in England, don't you?—but the skipper had better do the rest."

"It does seem a frightful responsibility for two girls," said Phyllis.

"Of course, if you'd consent to have my aunt—and me—we'd take all the trouble off your hands, and half the expense," remarked Mr. Starr. "My poor aunt is so fond of the water, and there's so little in Scotland——"

"Little in Scotland?"

"Well, only a few lakes and rivers. It does seem hard she should be disappointed."

"She mightn't like us," said Phyllis.

"She would lo—I mean, she'd be no aunt of mine if she didn't. I'd cut her off with a penny."

"It's generally aunts who do that with their nephews," said I.

"Ah, but she's different from other aunts, and I'm different from other nephews. May I telegraph that she's to come?"

"I thought she was coming."

"I mean, may I telegraph that she's to be a chaperon? I ought to let her know. She might—er—want more dresses or bonnets, or something."

Phil and I laughed, and so did Mr. Starr. After that, of course, we couldn't be stony-hearted; besides, we didn't want to be. I could see that, even to Phil, the thought of a cruise taken in the company of our new friend and that ideal chaperon, his aunt, Lady MacNairne, had attractions which the idea of a cruise alone with her stepsister had lacked.

"Well, in the circumstances, I think we should be callous brutes not to say 'Yes,'" I replied.

"I don't want to force you into consenting from pure generosity," went on Mr. Starr. "If you'd like to consult your relations, and have them find out that I'm all right——"

I laughed again. "I know you better than I do them," said I. "I've never seen them yet. I think we can take you on faith, just as you've taken our claims to the boat. Your Scotch aunt alone would be a guarantee, if we needed one. A Scotch aunt sounds so extra reliable. But perhaps my relatives may be of use in other ways, as they've lived in Rotterdam always, I fancy. They might even find us a skipper, if your negotiations fall through. Anyhow, I'll write a letter from our hotel to the head of the family, introducing myself as his long-lost cousin twice removed."

"What is your hotel, if I may ask?" inquired Mr. Starr.

I told him, and it turned out that it had been his till this very morning, when he had removed his things to "Lorelei," with the intention of living on board till he was ready to start. Now he proposed to have them taken back to the hotel, and rearranged on the barge when his aunt came. As for that sly old person, the caretaker, our new friend volunteered to straighten out everything with him, our affair as well as his own.

"When he discovers that we can't be bothered having the law of him, as he richly deserves, he will remember his English, or I'll find the way to make him," said the young man in such a joyous, confident way, that thereupon I dubbed him our "lucky Starr."

IV

"How funny if I've got relations who can't speak any language except Dutch!" I said, after I'd sent a letter by messenger to the address of the Robert van Buren found in the directory.

But half an hour later an answer came back, in English. Mine very sincerely, Robert van Buren, would give himself the pleasure of calling on his cousin immediately. When I received this news it was one o'clock, and we were finishing lunch at the hotel, in the society of Mr. Starr, who had already wired to his aunt that she was to play the part of chaperon.

I read the letter aloud, and Phil and I decided that it sounded old.

"Mother spoke once or twice of father's cousin, Robert van Buren; so I suppose he's about the age my father would have been if he'd lived," I said. "I hope he'll not turn out a horror."

"I hope he'll not forbid you to associate with my aunt and me," cut in Mr. Starr. "It's a stiff kind of handwriting."

"He can't make me stiff," said I. "Cousins twice removed don't count—except when they can be useful."

"A gentleman in the reading-room to see you, miss," announced the waiter, who could speak English, handing me a card on a tray. It was a foreign-looking card, and I couldn't feel in the least related to it, especially as the "van" began with a little "v."

"Come and support me, Phil," I begged, glancing regretfully at a seductive bit of Dutch cheese studded with caraway seeds, which it would be rude to stop and eat.

It's rather an ordeal to meet a new relation, even if you tell yourself that you don't care what he thinks of you. I slipped behind Phil, making her enter the reading-room first, which gave me time to peep over her shoulder and fancy we had been directed wrongly. There was a man in the room, but he could not have been a man in the days when mother was speaking of "father's cousin." His expression only was old: it might have been a hundred. The rest of him could not be more than twenty-eight, and it was all extremely good-looking. If he were to turn out a cousin I should not have to be ashamed of him. He was like a big, handsome cavalryman, with a drooping mustache that was hay-colored, in contrast with a brown skin, and a pair of the solemnest gray eyes I've ever seen—except in the face of a baby.

"Are you Miss Van Buren?" this giant asked Phil gravely, holding out a large brown hand.

"No," said Phil, unwilling to take the hand under false pretenses.

It fell, and so did the handsome face, if anything so solemn could have become a degree graver than before.

"I beg your pardon," said the owner of both, speaking English with a Scotch accent. "I have made a deceit."

I laughed aloud. "I'm Helen Van Buren," I said. And I put out my hand.

His swallowed it up, and though I wear only one ring I could have shrieked. Yet his expression was not flattering. There are persons who prefer my style to Phil's, but I could see that he wasn't one of them. I felt he thought me garish; which was unjust, as I can't help it if my complexion is very white and very pink, my eyes and eyelashes rather dark, and my hair decidedly chestnut. I haven't done any of it myself, yet I believe the handsome giant suspected me, and was sorry that Phil was not Miss Van Buren.

"Are you my cousin Robert Van Buren's son?" I asked.

"I am the only Robert van Buren now living," he answered.

I longed to be flippant, and say that there were probably several dotted about the globe, if we only knew them; but I dared not, under those eyes—absolutely dared not. Instead, I remarked inanely that I was sorry to hear his father was not alive.

"He died many years ago. We have got over it," he replied. And I almost laughed again; but that angel of a Phil looked quite sympathetic.

In a few minutes we settled down more comfortably, with Phil and me on a sofa together, and Cousin Robert on a chair, which kept me in fits of anxiety by creaking and looking too small to hold him.

Phil and I held hands, as girls generally do when they are at all self-conscious, if they sit within a yard of each other; and we all began to talk in the absurd way of new-found relations, or people you haven't seen for a long time.

We asked Robert things, and he answered; and when we'd encouraged him a good deal, he asked us things too, looking mostly at Phyllis. At last we arrived at the information that he had a mother and two sisters, who spent the summers at Scheveningen, in a villa. Then fell a silence, which Phil tactfully broke by saying that she had heard of Scheveningen. It must be a beautiful place, and she'd been brought up with a cup that came from there. When she was good, as a child, she was allowed to play with it.

"I should think you were always good," said Cousin Robert. Phyllis blushed, and then he blushed too, under his brown skin. "I have also a fiancée at Scheveningen," he went on, à propos of nothing—unless of the blush.

"Is she a Dutch girl?" I asked.

"Oh yes."

"I suppose she is very pretty and charming?"

"I do not know. I am used to her. We have played together when we were young. I go every Saturday to Scheveningen, when they are there, to stay till Monday."

"Oh!" said Phil.

"Oh!" said I.

Silence again. Then, "It was very good of you to come and see us so quickly after I wrote."

"It was my duty; and my pleasure too" (as second thought). "You must tell me your plans."

So we told them, and Cousin Robert did not approve. "I do not think it will do," said he, firmly.

"I'm afraid it must do," I returned, with equal firmness disguised under a smile.

Phil apologized for me as she gave me a squeeze of the hand.

"We've been very happy together, Nell and I," she explained, "but we have never had much excitement. This is our first chance, and—we shall be well chaperoned by Lady MacNairne."

"Yes; but she is the aunt of the stranger young man."

"Geniuses are never strangers. He is a genius," I said. "You've no idea how his Salon picture was praised."

"But his character. What do you know of that?"

"It's his aunt's character that matters most, and the MacNairnes are irreproachable."

(I had never heard the name until this morning, but there are some things which you seem to have been born knowing; and I was in a mood to stake my life upon Lady MacNairne.)

"It is better that you see my mother," said Cousin Robert.

"It will be sweet of her to call on us."

"I do not think she can do that. She is too large; and she does not easily move from Scheveningen. But if she writes you a note, to ask you and Miss Rivers, you will go, is it not?"

"With pleasure," I said, "if it isn't too far. You see, Lady MacNairne may arrive soon, and when she does——"

"But now I will see my mother, and I will bring back the letter. I will drive with an automobile which a friend has lent me—Rudolph Brederode; and when you have read the note, you will both go in the car with me to Scheveningen to stay for all night, perhaps more."

"Oh, we couldn't think of staying all night," I exclaimed. "We'll stop here till——"

"It is not right that you stop here. I will go now, and, please, you will pack up to be ready."

"We haven't unpacked yet," I said. "But we couldn't possibly—for one thing, your mother may not find it convenient."

My cousin Robert's jaw set. "She surely will find it convenient."

"What people you Dutch are!" the words broke from me.

He looked surprised. "We are the same like others."

"I think you are the same as you used to be hundreds of years ago, when you first began to do as you pleased; and I suppose you have been doing it ever since."

Cousin Robert smiled. "Maybe we like our own way," he admitted.

"And maybe you get it!"

"I hope. And now I will go to order the automobile." He glanced at his watch, an old-fashioned gold one. "In an hour and a quarter I will be at Scheveningen. Fifteen minutes there will be enough. Another hour and a quarter to come back. I will be for you at four."

"You don't allow any time for the motor to break down," I said.

"I do not hope that she will break down. She is a Dutch car."

"And serves a Dutch master. Oh no; certainly she won't break down."

He stared, not fully comprehending; but he did not pull his mustache, as an Englishman does, when he wonders if he is being chaffed. He shook hands with us gravely, and bowed several times at the door. Then he was gone, and we knew that if he didn't come back at four with that letter from his mother, it would be because she—or the motor—was more Dutch than he.

When he disappeared, Phil and I went out into the garden for the sole purpose, we told each other, of having coffee; and when we saw Mr. Starr sitting with an empty cup and a cigarette, we both exclaimed, "Oh, are you here?" as if we were surprised; so I suppose we were.

We both exclaimed, "Oh, are you here?"

He had caught a glimpse of Cousin Robert, and said what a splendid-looking fellow he was—a regular Viking; but when we agreed, he appeared depressed. "Oh, my prophetic soul!" he murmured. "The cousin will want his mother to go with you, and my poor aunt will be nowhere."

"His mother is too large for the boat," I assured him confidently. Mr. Starr brightened at this, but clouded again when he heard that Phil and I were to stop the night with my cousins.

"They will tear you away from me—I mean, from my aunt," he said.

I shook my head. "No. It's difficult to resist the Dutch, I find, when they want you to do anything; but when they want you not to do anything—why, that is too much. Your pride comes to the rescue, and you fight for your life. We'll promise, if you like; for your aunt's sake. Won't we, Phil?"

"Yes; for your aunt's sake," she echoed.

"We can depend upon you, then—my aunt and I?"

"Upon us and 'Lorelei.'"

"You're angels. My aunt will bless you. And now, would you care to look at the barge I've got the refusal of? If you're going to tow her, you ought to know what she's like. I don't think she'll put 'Lorelei' to shame, though, for she's good of her kind; belongs to a Dutch artist who's in the habit of living aboard, but he has a commission for work in France, this summer, and wants to let her. She's lying near by."

Who would have thought, when we arrived a few hours before, strangers in Rotterdam, that we would be sauntering about the town with an American young man, calmly making plans for a cruise in his society? I'm sure that if a palmist had contrived to capture Phil's virtuous little hand, and foretold any such events, my stepsister would have considered them as impossible as monstrous. Nevertheless, she now accepted the arrangements Fate made for her, as quietly as the air she breathed; for was not the figure of our future chaperon already hovering in the background, title and old Scotch blood and all, sanctifying the whole proceeding?

Phil was so enchanted with the barge (which turned out to be a sort of glorified Dutch sea-going house-boat) that she was fired with sudden enthusiasm for our cruise. And the thing really is a delectable craft—stout, with a square-shouldered bow, and a high, perky nose of brass, standing up in the air as one sees the beak of a duck sometimes, half-sunk among its feathers and pointing upward. "Waterspin" (which means "water-spider") is the creature's name, and she is a brilliant emerald, lined and painted round her windows with an equally brilliant scarlet. This bold scheme of color would be no less than shocking on the Thames; but, sitting in that olive-green canal, in a retired part of Rotterdam, "Waterspin" looked like a pleasing Dutch caricature of Noah's Ark.

Inside we found her equally desirable, with four little boxes of sleeping-rooms, yellow painted floors, and bunks curtained with hand-embroidered dimity, stiff as a frozen crust of snow; a studio, with a few charming bits of old painted Dutch furniture to redeem it from bareness, and a kitchen which roused all Phil's domestic instincts.

"Oh, the darling blue and white china, and brass things, and those adorable pewter pots!" she cried. "I love this boat. I could be quite happy living on her all the rest of my life."

"So you shall! I mean, while she is mine you must consider yourselves as much at home on her as on your own boat," stammered Mr. Starr. "Or, if you'd rather take up your quarters on the barge——"

"No, no. Nell and I will live on 'Lorelei'; but I do think, if you'll let me, I'll come sometimes and cook things in that heavenly kitchen."

"Let you? Whatever you make shall be preserved in amber."

"Wouldn't it be better to eat it?" asked Phil.

"Can you cook? I should as soon expect to see a Burne-Jones lady run down the Golden Stair into a kitchen——"

"I can make delicious toast and tea-cakes and salad dressing—can't I, Nell?—and lots of other things."

"Pluperfect. I only wish I could. I shan't trouble your kitchen, Mr. Starr."

"But you can sing so beautifully, dear, and sketch, too; and your stories——"

"Don't dare speak of them!" I glared; and poor Phil, unselfishly anxious to show off my accomplishments to Lady MacNairne's nephew, was silent and abashed. I hoped that Mr. Starr hadn't heard.

He was delighted with our approval of the barge, and enlarged upon the good times before us. No one could know Holland properly without seeing her from the waterways, he said, and we would know her by-and-by as few foreigners did. She could not hide a secret from us that was worth finding out. He hadn't planned any regular tour for himself; he had meant to wander here and there, as the fancy seized him; but now the route was for us to decide. Whatever pleased us would please him. As for his painting, you could hardly go round a corner in Holland without stumbling on a scene for a picture, and he should come across them everywhere; he had no choice of direction. But in seven or eight weeks we could explore the waterways pretty thoroughly. Our skipper would be able to put us on the right track, and let us miss nothing. Had we, by-the-by, asked Mr. van Buren if he'd any skippers up his sleeve? Oh, well, it didn't matter that we'd forgotten. He himself had the names of several, besides some men he had already seen, and he would interview them all. It was certain that in a day or two at most, he could find exactly the right person for the place, and we might be sure that while we were away at Scheveningen he would not be idle in our common interests.

"After all, even you must admit that men are of some use," said Phil, when we were at the hotel again, waiting for Cousin Robert and his car. "Supposing you'd had to organize the tour alone, as we expected, could you have done it?"

"Of course," I replied, bravely.

"What! and engaged a chauffeur and a skipper? Who would have told you what to do? I'm sure we could never have started without your cousin Robert and Mr. Starr."

"What has Cousin Robert got to do with it?" I demanded.

Phil reflected. "Now I come to think of it, I don't know exactly. But he is so dependable; and there's so much of him."

"I hope there won't be too much," said I.

"I like tall men," remarked Phil, dreamily. Then she looked at her watch. "It's five minutes to four. He ought to be here soon."

"He'll come inside ten minutes," I prophesied.

But he came in three. I might have known he would be before his time, rather than after. And he arrived with a nice letter from his mother.

Neither Phyllis nor I had ever been in a motor-car until we got gingerly into that one. I had heard her say that she would never thus risk her life; but she made no mention of this resolution to Cousin Robert. If she had, it would have been useless; for without doubt she would in the end have had to go; and it saved time not to demur.

V

The car which stood throbbing at the door of the hotel was large and handsome, as if made to match my cousin, and it was painted flame color.

"I am just learning to drive," said Robert, who wore a motoring-cap which was particularly becoming. "I do not know much about automobiles yet; soon I shall buy one. It is rowing I like best, and skating in winter, though I have not time to amuse myself except at the end of weeks, for I am manager of my poor father's factory. But my fiancée likes the automobile, and to please her I am learning with my friend's car."

"That is good of you," said Phyllis.

"Yes, it is," he replied gravely. "Would you that I drive or the chauffeur? He has more experience."

I left the decision to Phil, as she is the timid one, but to my surprise she answered——

"Oh, you, of course."

Cousin Robert looked pleased. "Are you not afraid?" he inquired, beaming.

"Ye—es, I am afraid, for I've never been before. But I shall be less afraid with you than with him." And she glanced at a weedy youth who was pouring oil from a long-nosed tin into something obscure.

"Will you sit in front by my side?" he asked. And it was only after Phil had accepted the invitation that he remembered to hope I wouldn't mind the chauffeur being in the tonneau with me. "It must have been one of you," he added, "and you and I are cousins."

"Twice removed," I murmured; but he was helping Phil into the car, and did not hear.

It was a wild moment when we started. But it would have looked odd to cling to the chauffeur for protection, so I did nothing; and it calmed me to see how Phyllis bore herself. She didn't even grasp the arm of the seat; she merely gazed up into Cousin Robert's face with a sweetly feminine look, which said, "My one hope is in you, but I trust you utterly." It was enough to melt the heart of a stone giant, even when seen through goggles. I had an idea that this giant was not made of stone, and I wondered what the fiancée of my cousin twice removed was made of.

After the first thrill of starting, when we seemed to be tearing like a tailless comet through a very small portion of space not designed to hold comets, I grew happy, though far from tranquil. I can't imagine people ever feeling really tranquil in an automobile, and I don't believe they do, though they may pretend. I'm sure I should not, even if I became a professional chauffeur, which heaven forbid. But part of the enjoyment came through not feeling tranquil. There was a savage joy in thinking every instant that you were going to be dashed to pieces, or else that you would dash somebody else to pieces, while all the time you knew in your heart that nothing of the sort would happen.

The car went splendidly, and I believe I should have guessed it was a Dutch one, even if Cousin Robert hadn't told me; it made so little noise, yet moved so masterfully, and gave an impression of so much reserve power. Indeed, I might have thought out several nice similes if there hadn't been quantities of trams and heavy drays blundering about, or if the inhabitants of Rotterdam had not had a habit of walking in large family groups in the middle of the street. The big horn through which Robert every now and again blew a mournful blast, was confusing when it arrived in the midst of an idea; and a little curved thing (like the hunting-horn of old pictures) into which the chauffeur occasionally mewed, was as disconcerting to my nerves as to those of the pedestrians who hopped out of the way.

The more we saw of Rotterdam, the more extraordinary did the city appear, and the more did I wonder that people should refer to it merely as a port.

"It is not a bad town," Robert said to Phyllis, in the half-fond, half-deprecating way in which, when talking to strangers, we allude to that spot of earth we happen to inhabit. "I would not change to live at The Hague, though the diplomatic set give sneers at us and call us commercial."

"Just as Edinburgh sneers at Glasgow," cut in Phil.

"Yes, like that. I have been much to Scotland on my business, and I know," answered Robert. "But we have many good things to show strangers, if they would look; pictures, and museums, and old streets; but it is not fashionable to admire Rotterdam. You should see the Boompjes at night, when the lights shine in the water. It is only a big dyke, but once it was the part where the rich people lived, and those who know about such things say the old houses are good. And I should like you to see where I live with my mother and sisters. It is an old house, too, in a big garden, with a pond and an island covered with flowers. But we do not pass now, so you must see it a future day."

To say all this, Cousin Robert had to yell above the roar of traffic on the stone pavements; but by-and-by, as town changed into country, we left the stones behind and came into the strangest road I have ever seen. It ran beside a little river—the Schie—which looked like a canal, and it was made of neat, purplish-brown bricks, laid edge to edge.

"Klinker, we call it," said Cousin Robert. "It's good for driving; never much dust or mud; and when you motor it gives grip to the 'pneus.' It wouldn't do for us of the Netherlands to leave our roads bare."

"Why, what would happen?" I bent toward him to ask. "Would the bottom of Holland drop out?"

"I think yes," he replied, seriously. "The saying is that there has been as much of sand laid on the road between Rotterdam and The Hague as would reach the top of the cathedral spire at Amsterdam, which you will see one day."

"Dear me, and yet it's so low and flat, now," soliloquized Phil. "Lower than the canals."

"It is nothing here to some places. We work hard to save the country we have made with our hands, we Netherlanders. All the streets and gardens of Rotterdam, and other towns too, sink down and down; but we are used to that. We do not stop to care, but go to work adding more steps up to the houses, so we can get in at our doors."

"I think you are wonderful," said Phyllis.

"I have not done very much myself," modestly replied Cousin Robert.

"But you would if necessary. I'm sure you'd have been like the little boy who saw the trickle of water coming out of the dyke, and put his thumb——"

"Phil, if you bring up that story I'll ask Cousin Robert van Buren to run into a windmill and kill you," I shrieked over her shoulder.

"But I would not do that," said he. Oh yes, he really was wonderful, my cousin Robert.

"There is a spot to interest an American," he deigned to fling a sop to me, nodding vaguely upward at some roofs on the River Maas. "Did you ever hear of Oude Delftshaven, cousin? But I don't suppose you have."

"Indeed I have!" I shrieked at him. "I wouldn't be a true descendant of Knickerbocker stock if I hadn't. On July 22, 1620, some Pilgrim Fathers (I'm not sure whether they were fathers then or afterwards) set sail from Oude Delftshaven for America."

(I didn't think it necessary to explain that, Knickerbocker as I was, I had absorbed this fact only the other day in "reading up" Holland.)

I was still more inclined to be reticent as to the newness of my knowledge when it appeared that Phil knew something of a poem on the subject by Mrs. Hemans. I could not allow my English stepsister to be better informed than I concerning a country which I already began to regard as a sort of confiscated family estate that ought to have been mine.

We were going fast now, so fast that the tears came to my eyes as the sweet-scented breeze rushed against my lashes.

"There's Schiedam," said Robert, indicating a town that stood up darkly out of the green plain. "You know, they make the famous 'Geneva' there."

We had never heard of Geneva in liquid form, but it appeared that "Geneva" or "Hollands" and gin were all the same thing; and Cousin Robert seemed almost offended when I said it was nice, with hot water and sugar, for a cold in the head.

I don't know whether the little Schie is really an idyllic stream, or whether the glamor of that azure day was upon it for me, but our first "waterway" seemed exquisite, as we spun along through country of wide horizons and magic atmosphere.

There were pretty houses, with balconies screened with roses—cataracts of roses, yellow, and pink, and white. We flew by lawns like the lawns of England, and thick, dark patches of forest, where the sun rained gold. There were meadows where a red flame of poppies leaped among the wheat, and quenched their fire in the silver river of waving grain. There were other meadows, green and sunny, where cows were being milked into blue pails lined with scarlet; and there were bowery tea-gardens divided into snug little arbors for two, where each swain could woo his nymph unseen by the next-door swain and nymph, though all couples were in sight from the river.

"Now we're coming to Delft," said Robert, long before I thought that we could be near that ancient town. "If Rudolph Brederode, who lends me this car, were here, he could tell much about the history," my cousin went on, mentioning his friend for the second time, as if with pride. "He is the sort of fellow who knows all the things to know, though he is a great sportsman, too. I never took interest in history, but William the Silent is our hero, so even I know of him and Delft. It was at Oude Delft he was murdered."

"He was one of my heroes when I was a little girl," said I. "I can recall my father telling splendid stories about him—as good as fairy tales. The best was about the way he earned the nickname of William the Silent."

I gazed with interest at the place where one of the greatest figures in the history of the world had lived and died.

A shady, lovable old town it seemed. We drove into a pleasant street, which looked so clear and green, from the mirror of its canal to the Gothic arch of its close arbor of fragrant lime-trees, that it was like a tunnel of illuminated beryl. The extraordinary brilliance of the windows added to the jewel-like effect. Each pane was a separate glittering square of crystal, and the green light flickered and glanced on the quaint little tilted spying-mirrors in which Dutch ladies see the life of the streets, themselves unseen.

The houses were of brown or purplish brick, with curiously ornamented doorways, the stucco decorations running in wavy lines up to the level of the first story windows; the door-steps white as pearl in the green glimmer; but there was nothing striking in the way of architecture until we swept into sight of an old Gothic building, blazing with colored coats-of-arms, ancient and resplendent.

"That's the Gemeenlandshuis van Delfsland," said Cousin Robert, with a beautiful confidence in our comprehension; and then, slowing down the car before a dark, high wall, with a secretive-looking door in the midst, "Here's the Prinzenhof, where William the Silent lived, and where Balthazar Gérard killed him."

"Oh," I exclaimed, as he was driving on, "can't we stop—can't we go in?"

"We could, but—I should not like to make us late for dinner," Cousin Robert demurred.

"Dinner? Why, it's ages before dinner, and——"

"We dine at half-past five," said he.

Phil and I gazed at each other with lifted eyebrows. Phil was pale, and I felt a sudden constriction of the throat. The idea of eating dinner at the hour when our souls cried for tea and toast, was little short of ghastly. Noblesse obliged us to conceal our loathing, but I did venture meekly to suggest that if we drove faster afterwards perhaps we might spare a few minutes for the Prinzenhof.

"There are things in The Hague you will want to stop for, too," said Robert. "But my sisters and I can bring you to see the pictures, and the Royal Palace and the Huis ten Bosch to-morrow; besides, I remember my mother meant to put off dinner for us until six, so we will, maybe, not be too late."

One should be thankful for the smallest mercies; and I hoped that the craving for tea might have subsided into callous resignation by six. What Phil, as a born Englishwoman, must have been feeling, I could easily conceive; and it was a pity this shock to her system had arrived on our first day, for only just before the blow she had said that Holland seemed too enchanting: she was glad, after all, that she had come, and would like to learn the language.

Luckily, Cousin Robert had remembered the change in the domestic program before it was too late, otherwise I am sure he would have denied us the Prinzenhof, and we should have had to sneak back by ourselves to-morrow. As it was we were allowed to have our own way, practically for the first time since we came to Holland.

Robert rang a bell, and a man appeared, who let us into the courtyard, more like the courtyard of a monastery than a palace; and among the historical dust-motes which clung to Cousin Robert's memory was the fact that the place actually had been a monastery, sacred to St. Agatha.

We crossed the courtyard, and just inside another door found ourselves on the scene of the great tragedy.

I knew it by instinct, before anybody told me; for suddenly the whole story came back just as I heard it from my father, not as I've read it in books of history. So vividly did he paint each detail, that I used to grow hysterical in my infantine way, and he was scolded by mother for "filling the child's mind with horrors."

Yes, there was the stairway, with the pale light coming from the low window; there was the white wall which had been spattered with the hero's life blood; there was the open door of the dining-hall where he had been carried back to die; there the white pillar behind which the murderer crouched, and there the dark archway through which Gérard had run, his heart beating thickly with the hope of escape, and the thought of the horse waiting beyond the ramparts and the moat.

I fancied I could see the prince, handsome still, in the fashion of dress he affected, since the days of the Water Beggars' fame. A stately figure in his rough and wide-brimmed hat, with the silk cord of the Beggars round the felt crown; and I could almost smell the smoke from the murderer's pistol, bought with the money William's generosity had given. There were the holes in the wall made by the poisoned bullets. How real it all seemed, how the centuries between slipped away! Let me see, what had the date been? I ought to remember. July——

"Phil, what day of the month is this?" I demanded with a start.

Phil turned at the open door of the dining-hall, which I could see had been made into a museum.

"July tenth," she answered promptly; for you can never catch Phil tripping as to a date, or a day of the week, even if you should shake her out of her first sleep to ask.

"Then it's the anniversary of his death!" I exclaimed. "July 10, 1584, it was. How strange we should have come on the very day! It makes it seem a pilgrimage."

"I don't find it strange," said Cousin Robert. "Many people come every day of the year."

Having thus poured the cold water of common sense on my sentiment, he dragged us into the dining-hall museum to see relics of William, and I should have been resentful, had not my eyes suddenly met other eyes looking down from the wall. They were the eyes of William the Silent himself when he was young—painted eyes, yet they spoke to me.

I don't know how fine that portrait may be as a work of art, but it is marvelously real. I understood in a moment why little, half-deformed Anna of Saxony had been so mad to marry him; I knew that, in her place, I should have overcome just as many obstacles to make that dark, haunting face the face of my husband.

Of course I've often read that William of Orange was a handsome man, as well as a dashing and extravagant gallant in his young days, but never till now had I realized how singularly attractive he must have been. The face in the portrait was sad, and as thoughtful as if he had sat to the artist on the day he heard the dreadful secret of the fate which Philip of Spain and Francis of France were plotting for the Netherlands, the day that decided his future, and gave him his name of "William the Silent." Yet in spite of its melancholy, almost sternness, it won me as no pictured face of a man ever did before.

"This is a great day for me," I said to Phil, who was close behind; "not only am I seeing Holland for the first time, but I've fallen in love with William the Silent."

I laughed as I made this announcement, though I was half in earnest; and turning to see whether I had shocked Cousin Robert, I found him in conversation with a tall, black-haired young man, near the door.

The man—he wore a gray suit, and carried a straw hat in his hand—had his back to me, and I remembered having seen the same back in the museum before we came in. Now he was going out, and evidently he and Cousin Robert had recognized each other as acquaintances. As I looked, he turned, and I saw his face. It was so like the face of the portrait that I felt myself grow red. How I did hope he hadn't overheard that silly speech!

For a moment his eyes and mine met as mine had met the eyes of the portrait. Then he shook hands with Robert and was gone.

"Very odd," said my cousin the giant, strolling toward us again, "that was Rudolph Brederode. And," he glanced at me, "his nickname among his friends is William the Silent."

"Why?" I asked, pretending unconsciousness.

"Don't you think there is a likeness?"

"I'm bad at seeing likenesses," said I.

"Why, Nell, I don't think you are," Phil defended me against myself. "You're always seeing the strangest resemblances between clouds and animals, and plants and people, and there's no end to what you find on wall papers. This very day you thought Mr. Starr like Robert Louis Stevenson, though I——"

"That's when my imagination's running loose," I explained. "Cousin Robert is talking about facts."

"Oh!" said Phil.

"It's rather an ugly portrait," I went on; "I don't suppose William of Orange was like it one bit."

"But we have two reasons for calling Brederode the Taciturn," said Robert. "He has a way to keep still about things which other people discuss. Sometimes it makes men angry, but especially the ladies. Brederode does not care what others think; he descends from the great Brederode, but he is different."

"The Water Beggar was brave," I remarked.

"Rudolph is brave," retorted Cousin Robert, firing up. "You will think so to-morrow."

"What is he going to do?" I asked. "Something to startle Holland?"

"Holland has seen him do it before, but you have not. You will see him ride better than any one else in the jumping contests at the Concours Hippique at Scheveningen. It will be a fine show, but Brederode and his horses will be the best. My mother has a box. She will take you."

"But I thought you were going to take us to The Hague and the Huis ten Bosch?"

"That will be in the early morning. Perhaps my sisters will go; and after we have finished the pictures at The Hague, we will meet my mother and my fiancée, Freule Menela van der Windt, at the race grounds about two, and the show will not be over till seven, so dinner will be late."

"You Dutch are a strong race," I murmured.

"Brederode says he always comes here when he's anywhere in the neighborhood, for a look at the Prinzenhof on the tenth of July," Robert went on. "Odd, is it not?"

"No more odd than that we should have been here," said I. But I said this in a low voice; and it's only a man who is in love with a girl who hears her when she mutters.

"He asked how the automobile was going, and I mentioned one or two things that bothered me, so he has gone out to talk to the chauffeur," Cousin Robert continued, unable to turn his thoughts from his Admirable Crichton. "Don't you think you've seen enough? It is late; and when I told Brederode I was showing Delft to my American cousin and an English friend, he said I must take you to the New Church, the tomb of William, and of Hugo Grotius. He wanted you to go to the Old Church too, and see the place where van Tromp lies, but we shall not have time. Besides, it would not please Miss Rivers."

"Why not?" asked Phyllis, large-eyed.

"You are English, and the English do not like to remember that Holland, through van Tromp, swept them off the seas—"

"Oh, I remember, he stuck up a broom on the mast," cut in Phil. "But it was long ago."

"How is it that the tombs of William and Grotius can be in a new church?" I reflected aloud.

"It is newer than the other, for it was founded in thirteen hundred and something," said Cousin Robert; "I suppose you ought to see it, even if dinner should be late. For, as Brederode says, 'Delft is the heart of Holland, and the New Church is the core of that heart.' It is for us what your Westminster Abbey is to you, Miss Rivers."

We went out from the old convent palace with its arched windows and narrow doors into the gold and green light of the Delft afternoon. In the street outside the courtyard stood the automobile, and the chauffeur was polishing something on it (people in Holland seem always to be polishing something, if they are obliged to stand still for a moment), but Mr. Rudolph Brederode, alias William the Silent, had vanished, and I was glad.

We got into the motor-car again, passing with every few yards some beautiful old building. But one thing in Delft disappointed me; I saw no storks, and I expected the air to be dark with storks.

"I don't think there are any now," said Robert, apologetically, "though Brederode would know."

"Isn't it true that the stork's the patron saint of Delft?" I asked. "Wasn't it here you had the fire which nearly ruined the city, hundreds of years ago, and the parent storks wouldn't leave their babies, but died covering them up with their wings? And didn't Holland take the stork, after that, for a kind of—of motto for the whole country because it was so brave and faithful?"

"Yes," Robert admitted, "Delft is not tired of storks, but storks are tired of Delft. You can offer them nice nests on long poles, and all kinds of inducements, to live in a certain place, but unless they choose, you cannot make them do anything."

"Ah, now I know why the Dutch have canonized storks!" I exclaimed.

And just then we arrived at the New Church, which looked inconceivably old, and inside was like a vast prison. But the tomb of black and white marble was fine, almost too fine, too much encrusted with ornament to perpetuate the memory of William the Silent. Still, I felt a thrill as I stood looking at the white, recumbent figure of the man who made Holland, and altered the face of Europe, resting so quietly after the storms of life, with his dog at his feet—the loyal little beast who saved him at Malines, and starved to death in the end, rather than live on in a dull world empty of its master.

I lingered for many minutes, remembering the eyes of the portrait, so warm with life and power, and Phil had to come and lead me away to the tomb of Hugo Grotius, the "miracle of Europe." Even Robert grew warm on the subject of Grotius, and put him ahead of Pitt, as the youthful prodigy of the world. What had he left unaccomplished when he was eighteen? And what story had ever been written by Dumas, or any other, to compare with his in melodramatic interest? I didn't know enough details of the brilliant being's history to argue (although I have always the most intense yearning to argue with Cousin Robert), but I made a note to read them up, in case I should ever be called upon to write a historical novel at short notice.

Robert discouraged Phil from buying the ware of Delft on its native heath, and we spun along twice as fast in leaving the town as we had in coming, either because a Dutchman's dinner-hour is sacred, or because this particular Dutchman was anxious to exchange our society for that of his fiancée. We flew over the smooth klinker road at such a rate that, had it been England, a policeman would have sprung from every bush. Nobody seemed to mind here, however; and the few horses we met had the air of turning up their noses at us, despite the physical difficulty in evoking that expression on an equine profile.

The country grew prettier. It was the sort of landscape old-fashioned artists used to produce out of their abundant imagination, scorning to be tied down by models, dashing in anything charming or outré which they happened to think of at the moment, and jumbling together an extravagant whole too good to be true. But there were only a few miles of it left after Delft: and we hadn't reveled in impossibly delicious farm-yards and supernaturally bowery gardens half long enough, when we ran into the outskirts of The Hague—"S. Gravenhage," as I love to call it to myself.

Until this moment, I'd been mentally patronizing Holland, admiring it, and wondering at it, of course, but half-consciously saying that quaintness, snugness, and historical interest were all we could expect of the Low Country. Elegance and beauty of form we mustn't look for: but I found myself surrounded by it in The Hague. There were streets of tall, brown palaces, far finer than the royal dwelling which Robert pointed out; the shops made me long to spring from the car and spend every penny set apart for the tour; the Binnenhof—that sinister theater of Dutch history—with its strangely grouped towers and palaces, and its huge squares, made me feel an insignificant insect with no right to opinions of any kind; and as I gazed up at the dark, medieval buildings, vague visions of Cornelis and John de Witt in their torture, of van Oldenbarneveld, and fair Adelaide de Poelgust stabbed and bleeding, flitted fearfully through my brain. I wanted to get out and look for the stone where Adelaide had fallen to die (how well I remembered that story, told in twilight and firelight by my father!), and only the set of Robert's shoulders deterred me. What was a romantic fragment of history, compared to the certainty that the roast would be overdone?

But when we swept into the green-gold dusk of the forest, I forgot such trivialities as buildings made by man.

Suddenly we were in a different world, an old, old world, with magic that lurked in each dusky vista, breathed from the perfume of leaf and fern, and whispered in the music of the trees, as if we had strayed upon the road that leads to fairyland.

"Fancy seeing fairyland from the motor-car!" I said to myself. "I never thought to go in such a fashion, though I've been sure that one day or another I would find the way there through such a forest as this."

I felt that, if I walked here alone, I might see something more mysterious than alder-trees, than giant beeches, and ancient oaks; than glints of flower-strewn waters shining out of shadow in green darkness deep and cool; than rustic bridges twined with creepers, or kiosks glimmering at the end of long, straight alleys. I should have seen processions of dim figures; chanting Druids and their victims; wild, fierce warriors, and blue-eyed women, their white arms and the gold of their long hair shining through the mist of centuries.

But then, I was in the motor-car: and though Robert, in a different and more sketchy costume, would have been a gallant Batavian warrior, there would be a certain indecorousness in permitting my fancy to make the necessary changes. I had to content myself, therefore, with things as they were; with the teuf-teuf of the automobile instead of the wild wailing of white-robed Druids, and with the coming and going of modern carriages under the shadowy branches, instead of strange chariots of bygone kings.

After all, we did not find fairy-land but merely villa-land, when we flashed out from the mysterious heart of the forest; but the villas were charming, scattered in the woods, ringed with flowery lawns, and not one without a huge veranda like a garden-room, fitted up with so many cushioned sofas, easy-chairs, and little tables, that it was clear the family life was lived there.

"I do hope my Dutch cousin's house at Scheveningen is as pretty as these," I said to myself. "It would be delicious to visit in a garden-room"; but presently we slipped out of the shade into sunlight, and were in a town of brick streets, huge hotels, with flags all a-flutter in a spanking, salt-smelling breeze, gay little shops and houses such as grow up by the sea. It was Scheveningen.

I blinked in the blaze of sunlight which tore open the green veil of dusk, and the air, though tingling with ozone, felt hot after the depths of the forest.

Not a flower, not a garden was to be seen, yet Scheveningen was a flower-garden of color in itself. Where the color came from you could scarcely say, yet it struck at your eyes from all directions. Flags flamed, roofs were red as beds of geraniums; or else they were green, or else they were vivid yellow. The hotels were of quaint design, with a suggestion of the Oriental; the shops had covered galleries, and the people moving in the big, circular place into which we drove—the place of the Kurhaus and of the circus—were drifting particles of the bright mosaic; tall, dark young officers (not at all typically Dutch according to preconceived ideas) in green and crimson or bright blue uniforms; pretty girls in white with rose-trimmed or scarlet hats; nursemaids in the costume of some remote province, the sunlight setting their gold head-ornaments on fire; tiny children in blue sailor-suits, or with a little red fez on a yellow head; old, white-haired gentlemen holding on unsuitable top-hats as they walked against the wind; white-aproned waiters flitting about restaurant verandas, carrying pink ices, or baskets of fruit, like jewels.

It was a gay scene, but Robert said it was nothing to the "high season," which began on the first of August, and brought throngs of fashionable people from all over Europe. As for the top-hats at which I laughed, he defended them stoutly, saying they were as much de rigueur at The Hague as in London, and he could see nothing comic in wearing them at the seaside.

Still we had had no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the fashionable center of Scheveningen.

In the center, the Kurhaus dominated all; hotel, restaurant, concert-room, theater, in one. Terrace below terrace it descended and sent out into the green water of the North Sea a great pier blossoming with flags. But the most individual feature was the large and enterprising family of "wind stoels"—dear, cozy basket-houses for one, like green and yellow bee-hives cut in half, or giant sunbonnets crowding the beach behind the bathing-machines. There one could nestle, self-contained as a hermit-crab in a shell, defying east wind or baking sun, happy with a book, or the person one liked best in a twin wind-stoel opposite.

Reposeful gaiety seemed at this first glance to be the note struck by Scheveningen, and the air was buoyant as I had never known air to be before.

"If you visit us in August," said Robert, "you will hear the best operas, see the best automobile races, the most exciting motor-boat races——"

"But we shall be on our own motor-boat in August," said I.

"I do not think so. You will perhaps let your boat. We will talk to my mother," Robert answered, as one soothes a fractious child. Then, before I had breath to answer, he swept us away from the beach, and drew up before an aggressively comfortable villa on a terrace opening to the sea.

VI

There was a garden-room with flower-painted walls, and Japanese furniture and silk things; and in the garden-room stood Cousin Robert's mother. The great glass doors were wide open, and she moved slowly to the threshold to meet us.

Yes, she is far too large to come and call upon a stranger; far, far too large for the motor-boat.

I saw in a flash why Robert put the family dinner-hour before the most important historical events which helped to make Holland. If his jaw is square enough, his gray eyes piercing enough to make his mother feel it convenient to entertain unknown guests, whatever her plans and inclinations, there's no doubt that her personality is more than commanding enough to exact respect for domestic arrangements.

It would need such a giant as Robert not to be overawed by her, outside domestic matters; and as for myself, though her pretty, smooth gray hair parts in the middle, and her cheeks grew as pink as a baby's when she smiled and told me in nice English to call her "Cousin Cornelia," I knew that if she said black were white I would instantly agree with her.

There are glass doors between the garden-room and a drawing-room behind. They were closed, because the Dutch (I am already learning) like to draw a firm dividing line between being in the house and in the open air; and I could see through the glass a half-length, life-size portrait of a humorous little brown gentleman, who was, no doubt, Cousin Cornelia's late husband, and Robert's father. Taking this for granted, it's evident that Robert gets his inches and his blond splendor of looks from his mother. There was so much of Cousin Cornelia in her black and white spotted muslin, that at first I was conscious of her presence alone. It was only her rich voice (like Devonshire cream, all in soft lumps when the English words were difficult) introducing "Freule Menela van der Windt, and your two cousins, Lisbeth and Lilli," which made me aware that others were present.

I turned to the fiancée first, and found her a dark, thin, near-sighted girl, with eye-glasses that pinched her nose, and perhaps her temper as well, for there isn't a line of her face which won't be cross-grained when she is old. She looked hard through her glasses at me and at Phil, taking stock of us both, and didn't offer to shake hands; but Lisbeth and Lilli, adorable strawberry-and-cream girls, twins of fifteen or sixteen, put out dimpled fingers.

Cousin Cornelia asked how we liked Holland, but without waiting for us to answer, told off Lisbeth and Lilli to show us our room, as there was only just time to wash away the dust of motoring.

I was awestruck by Cousin Cornelia, and depressed by Menela; still I hugged the thought that we were in luck to see the inside of a Dutch home, and determined to make the most of our experience, which may not occur again.

I never supposed it possible for the interior of a house to shine as this does. Everything shines, even things that no one expects to present a polished surface. For instance, does anybody (not Dutch) call upon walls to behave as if they were mirrors? Yet as I went up the rather steep stairs of the Villa van Buren I could see each movement I made, each rise and fall of an eyelash repeated on a surface of brilliantly varnished walnut.

"What wonderful wood!" I exclaimed.

"It is not real. It is paint," said pretty Lisbeth. "Do you not have walls like this?"

"Never," I replied.

"Every one does in Holland. We admire them," explained Lilli.

"But what a lot of work to keep them so bright."

"It is only done once a day," she said apologetically. "The servant does it when she has finished the windows."

"What—all the windows in the house—every day?"

"How else would they be clean?" asked Lisbeth, surprised.

There was no answer to this, from a Dutch point of view, so I remarked meekly that it must take all the servant's time.

"It is what they like," said Lilli. "But we have another woman for the floors and beating out the rugs, and doing the brass, so it is not so much."

"Floors and rugs and brass every day, too?"

"Of course," returned both girls together, as if I had asked them about their baths or their tooth-brushes. "Of course."

Lisbeth opened the door of a front room on the second floor.

"This is the spare room," said she, and advanced cautiously through the dusk caused by the closing of the shutters. "We keep them so in the afternoon," she explained, "because of the sunshine."

"Yes, otherwise the room would be hot, I suppose?"

"We do not mind its being hot. It is because the sun would fade the carpet and the curtains." She threw open the blinds as she spoke, but carefully shut both windows again.

"Oh, mayn't we have them open?" I ventured to ask. "The air is lovely."

"If you like," my cousin replied. "Only, if you do, the sand may blow in."

"Just at the top then."

"At the top? I have not seen a window that opens at the top. We do not have them made so."

"How funny! But I suppose there must be a reason why a whole nation should go on having windows that won't open at the top."

"I do not know, except that we have always had them like that, so probably it is better to go on," said Lilli, after a few seconds' reflection, during which she looked exceedingly charming. She and Lisbeth made no attempt at having figures, but their faces are perfect, and their long tails of hair are fair and glossy as the silk of American corn.

When the twins left us to our own devices, I was for simply washing hands and faces; but Phil fiercely tore off her blouse, and made herself pink with the effort of unearthing another from our box.

"What does it matter about changing?" I asked. "There's no time, and they don't expect it. Besides, our things are as good as theirs—except Miss van der Windt's. She's very smart—to make up for her plainness."

"That's just the point," said Phil, struggling into a white, medallioned blouse that fastened as intricately as the working of a prize puzzle. "I've taken such a dislike to her, and she to us."

"How do you know?"

"I can't tell how. But I do know. And I want our frocks to be prettier than hers. Do change, like a pet. I'll hook you up, if you'll do me. Come, you might. You would bring me abroad."

"Oh, all right!"

So I changed. And by dint of supernatural speed we were ready to leave our green-and-pink doll's bedroom just as a Japanese gong moaned an apology for supplying us with dinner instead of tea.

Once in a "blue moon" Phil and I are invited by some one to dine at the Carlton or the Savoy, or at houses where the dinners are long and elaborate; but memories of those dinners pale before the reality of this at the Villa van Buren, in a handsome, shut-up dining-room.

There were hors d'oeuvres, and shell fish, and soup, and another kind of fish; and after that began a long procession of meat and birds, cooked in delicious, rich sauces. There were so many that I lost count, as Noah must when he stood at the ark door to receive the animals as they came along, two by two; but these were a little easier to keep track of, because you could remind yourself by saying: "That was the one done up in currant juice; that was the one with compote of cherries," and so on; which, of course, Noah couldn't.

Phil's capacity and mine was exhausted comparatively early in the feast, but everybody else was eating steadily on, so we dared not refuse a course, lest it should be considered rude in Holland. We did our best, straight through to a wonderful iced pudding, and managed a crumb of spiced cheese; but when raw currants appeared, we had to draw the line. The others called them "bessen," pulling the red beads off their stems with a fork, and sprinkling them with sugar, but my blood curdled at the sight of this dreadful fruit, and my mouth crinkled up inside.

Although we sat down at six, it was after eight when we rose, and as the windows were shut, the room was suffocating. Everybody looked flushed, and I dared not hope, after excluding the air for so long, that we should be allowed a breath of it later. But Cousin Cornelia, as a matter of course, led the way into the garden-room, where lamps, shaded with rose-colored silk, had now been lighted on two of the book-and magazine-strewn tables.

The strong air of the sea blew blessedly upon us, seeming cold after the heat of the dining-room, but Cousin Cornelia did not even wrap a shawl about her shoulders. We were out-of-doors now, and it was right to have air, so you took it for granted, and did not suffer. But indoors, what were windows for if you did not keep them closed? It seemed a waste of good material, and therefore a tempting of Providence to take revenge by sending you bronchitis or rheumatism.

It was exquisite in the garden-room. Sea and sky mingled in a haze of tender blue. All the air was blue, spangled with the lights of the pier; and our lamps, and the shaded lamps of other garden-rooms, glowed in the azure dusk like burning flowers, roses, and daffodils, and tulips.

We had coffee in cups small and delicate as egg-shells, and the old silver spoons were spoons for dolls or fairies.

Robert asked if we would like to go to the circus, which could not, he said, be surpassed in Europe; or to a classical concert at the Kurhaus: but we were contented in the garden-room, with the music of the sea. We talked of many things, and if Robert is deficient in a knowledge of history, the others make up for his ignorance. They know something of everything; and even the apple-blossom twins could put Phyllis and me to shame, if they were not too polite, on the subject of modern musicians and painters.

They speak French, German, and Italian, as well as English: a smattering of Spanish too; yet they said modestly, when we exclaimed at their accomplishments, that it was nothing; hardly anybody would learn Dutch, so the Dutch must learn the languages of other nations.

As for Freule Menela (I must not call her "Miss," it seems, because "Freule" is a kind of title) she is the cleverest of all, as the sweet twins tried to make us understand; and the pretty creatures are proud of her, thinking little of their own beauty. Sometimes I fancied that a shade of contempt passed over her face when Robert ventured a remark which showed him more accomplished as sportsman than scholar; but, if she noticed that he turned to Phil or me with any brightening of interest, she at once took pains to engage his attention.

They talked in low, pleasant voices, scarcely raising their tones or making a gesture; and there was always that faint suggestion of the Scotch accent, whether they spoke English or broke into Dutch. When I remarked upon it, Cousin Cornelia laughed and said it was perhaps the common Celtic ancestry; and that if the Dutch heard Gaelic talked, they could recognize a few words here and there.

It was not more than an hour after we finished our coffee, that tea was brought, with more beautiful china, and a great deal of handsome silver. What with this potent mixture of stimulants, and being in a new house, and thinking exciting thoughts of the future, I felt I shouldn't be able to sleep. Nevertheless, after we'd said good-night, and Phil and I were undressing, I was not pleased when Cousin Cornelia knocked at the door.

"She has come about the motor-boat," I thought, "to tell us we oughtn't to go. Heaven grant me strength to resist." For in her quilted Japanese silk dressing-gown she looked larger and more formidable than ever.

Not a word did she say about the motor-boat at first. It was our past which seemed to interest her, not our future. As a relation she has the right to ask me things about myself, and Phil's history is inextricably tangled up with mine.

She wanted to know where we lived in London, and how: also on what, though she didn't put it as crudely as that. I was frank, and told her about my serial stories and Phil's typing.

"I suppose you think we're mad to break up our work and go on a motor-boat tour in Holland, as if we were millionaires, when really we're poor girls," I said, before she had time to reprove us. "But we have each about a hundred and twenty pounds a year, whatever happens, so it isn't as desperate as you might think. Besides, it is going to be the time of our lives. Even my stepsister feels so now, though she was against it at first, and neither of us would give it up for anything."

"I don't think you should give it up," said Cousin Cornelia. You might have knocked me down with a feather—quite a small one: for in her note she had said we must come and let her offer us good advice before it was too late; and Robert had hinted that his mother meant to dissuade us from our wild-goose chase—in the company of Mr. Starr and Mr. Starr's aunt.

"I think you know how to take care of yourselves," she went on.

"And we'll have a chaperon," Phil assured her.

"So I have heard, from my son. I have great faith in the Scotch. Yes, as you have been a little too kind-hearted, and promised this strange young man, it is necessary that somebody should have an aunt. Otherwise, if you two had been quite alone together, it would not so much have mattered. In Holland girls have liberty, more than anywhere except in America. The bicycle is their chaperon, for all young girls and men bicycle with us. The motor-boat might have been your chaperon. Even if the aunt should not come, perhaps the nephew could be got rid of, and a way arranged, rather than give up your tour."

We were delighted, and I could have hugged Cousin Cornelia. Indeed, I did thank her warmly, and was rather surprised that Phil, who usually overflows with gratitude for the slightest kindness, was not more effusive over my relative's interest in our affairs, and her broad-minded verdict.

"She's a lamb, after all, isn't she?" I asked, when the large lady had gone, and I was ready to creep into a bed only an inch too short for me.

"She may be a lamb, but she isn't going to let us shear her, if she can help it," said Phil, looking deadly wise.

"What do you mean?"

"My dear girl, with all your cleverness, you're only a baby child about some things. Don't you see what's she's driving at?"

I shook my head, with my hair about my face.

"Or what all her questions were leading up to? Well, then, what do you think has made her change her mind about our motor-boating?"

"She saw we could take care of ourselves."

"She has found out that we're poor, and obliged to. She supposed from what your cousin Robert told her, that we were heiresses; and she would have kept us on a long visit if—oh, you silly old dear, don't you see she's afraid of us—with him? She'll be polite and nice, but she wants us to disappear."

"Good gracious!"

"Pretty Lilli told me this evening that Freule Menela van der Windt hasn't much money, but she comes of a splendid family: she's a distant relation of that Mr. Brederode, and her people are diplomats who live at The Hague, though she's an orphan and visits about. If one of us were rich—why—oh, it's too horrid to go on. Now, maybe, you understand what I mean, and can put two and two together and agree with me."

"For a saint, you sometimes develop a hideous amount of worldly wisdom, my Phil," I replied. "But when I come to think Cousin Cornelia over, I'm afraid you're right. It would be fun to flirt with Robert, and frighten her, wouldn't it?"

"We are going away—to the motor-boat—to-morrow, and we shall never see him again," said Phil. "Besides, it's wrong to flirt, even with foreigners; and now do let me say my prayers."

VII

Next morning, when I waked up, and cautiously drew my watch from under the pillow, not to disturb Phyllis, it was only six o'clock, and there was Phil gazing at me, with eyes large and bright in the green dusk that filtered through the olive curtains.

"I've been awake for ages," said she.

"What are you thinking about?"

"The motor-boat. Queer—but I can't help it."

"Neither can I. Can you go to sleep again?"

"No. Can you?"

"Not I. Let's get up, and creep out of doors. What fun to go down to the beach and take a bath!"

"Nell! In our nighties?"

"Silly! We'll hire things—and bathing-machines."

After mature deliberation Phil decided not to risk being taken for a thief by the van Buren family; but I could not abandon the idea, and fifteen minutes later I was softly unlocking the front door, to steal alone into the pearly, new-born day. Oh, the wonder of it—the wonder of each new day, if one only stopped to think; but the wonder of this above all others!

Already there were a few people about, hurrying beachward; and when I reached the level of the firm, yellow sand, there were the red-trousered men of the bathing-machines, in full activity, getting their horses into the traces, while dogs raced wildly over sand-hillocks, and children played with bright, sea-washed shells the waves had flung them.

Two or three of the bath-machines were in use, some were engaged for persons not yet arrived, and I thought myself lucky in securing one drawn by the handsomest horse of all. The others were dull, blasé-looking creatures compared to him; indeed, he was far too fine for a mere bathing-machine, and had a lovely cushiony back like the animals on which beautiful ladies pirouet in circuses. I longed to try it myself, when my shoes and stockings were off.

Just as I had got into the prickly blue serge costume provided by the "management," I heard the sound of stirring military music, played not far away by a brass band, and something queer happened at the same moment. The machine began to rock as if there were an earthquake, to dart forward, to retreat, and at last to go galloping ahead at a speed to suggest that in a sudden fit of hallucination it had persuaded itself it was a motor-car.

"That horse!" I gasped, and swaying first against one wall, then against the other, scarcely able to keep my feet, I tore the door open and peeped out.

If I had not been frightened I should have laughed, for it was plain to see from the expression of that cushiony back, that the animal was merely pretending to be afraid of the music, in a kittenish wish for a little early morning fun. But he was also pretending in quite a life-like manner to run away, and the thought occurred to me that the consequences might be as awkward for the occupant of the machine as if the jest were earnest.

"Whoa, whoa," cried a voice in pursuit, and splash! went the beast into the surf. He was playing that he was a sea-horse, now, and enjoying it selfishly, without a thought of poor me in the horrid, tottery little box that would be knocked over by a big wave, maybe, in another instant, in a welter of sand and salt water, under a merry horse's hoofs.

I clung to the door with one hand, and the frame with the other, swinging back and forth on the threshold, with abnormally large iron shoes flying up and down in the wet green foreground, and the whole North Sea towering over me in the middle distance—oh, but a very near middle distance!

I wavered in mind as well as body. If I didn't jump out—now, this minute—I might be caught and pinned like a mouse in a trap, under the water. If I did jump, the horse would kick me, and the wheels of the machine would go over me, and I should be battered as well as drowned before anybody could fish me out. I did feel horribly alone in the world, and the waves looked as tall as transparent green skyscrapers.

"One, two; at three I'll jump," I was saying resolutely, between chattering teeth, when a head came toward me in the sea. It came on top of a wave, and like the dear little cut-off cherubs in old-fashioned prayer-books, it seemed to have no body, yet I recognized it, and felt half inclined to bow (salutation, O Caesar, from one about to die!) only it would have seemed ridiculous to bow to a mere passing head, when one was on the eve of being swept away by the North Sea. Phyllis might have done it. I gave a short shriek, and then it appeared that the head had full control of the wave, for it stopped and let the wave rush by, to show that it had a tall, brown, dripping body, sketchily clad in the kind of thing that men dare to call a bathing-suit.

It did not seem strange at the time that William the Silent should be shot from a wave as if by a catapult, and still less strange that without a word he should seize my horse by the head and stop him. It seemed the sort of thing that ought to happen to foreigners traveling in Holland, if in need of succor.

"Oh, thank you so much!" I heard myself saying, just as if he had had on a frock-coat and top-hat, and had stopped a hansom cab for me in Bond Street.

"Not at all," I heard him reply, in the same London-in-the-season tone. Then suddenly I thought of Stanley in the desert saying, "Dr. Livingstone, I believe?" and my bare feet, and his dripping hair, and the whole scene struck me so quaintly that I laughed out aloud; whereupon he smiled a wet, brown smile, showing white teeth.

"I'm not having hysterics," I spluttered, with my mouth full of spray. "It's only—only—" and the spray choked me with its salt.

"Of course," said William the Silent, grave again, and so like the portrait that I felt I must be a historical character, acting with him in an incident forgotten or expurgated by Motley. "I'm so glad I came. I saw you from further out, and thought something was wrong. But it's all right now."

"Yes, thank you," I said meekly. "Why, you're an Englishman, aren't you?"

"Dutch to the backbone," he answered; and then, suddenly conscious, perhaps, that the (might one call it "feature"?) he had mentioned, was too much exposed to be discussed thus lightly, he changed the subject.

"Here's your man," he said quickly, and forthwith fell to scolding in vehement Dutch the unfortunate wretch who had waded to the rescue. The horse, made sadder if not wiser by blows from his master, allowed himself to be backed for a certain distance, until it was safe for me to descend and take my postponed bath. I had but time to bow and murmur more inane thanks, to receive another bow and polite murmur in return (both murmurs being drowned by the sea) when the retrograde movement of the bathing-machine parted me and my living life-preserver. He stood in the water looking after us long enough to see that there would be no further incidents, then took a header into the waves again.

I'm not sure that my adventure did not add spice to the salt of my bath. Anyhow, it was glorious, and I ran back to the villa at last tingling with joy of life, in time to be let in by a maid who was cleaning the door-steps. It was half-past seven, and breakfast was at eight. I had to make haste with my toilet, but luckily there are few tasks which can't be accompanied by a running fire of chat (that is, if one is a woman) so I had told everything to Phyllis by the time I had begun fastening the white serge frock in which I was to go to The Hague and the Concours Hippique. Just then the Japanese gong sent forth its melancholy wail, so we hurried down, and I forgot to tell Phyllis not to mention the incident. I didn't think it the kind of incident which would be approved by the van Buren family, and on second thoughts I didn't approve of it myself.

Hardly were we comfortably seated at the table, however, when Phil told Robert what a part his friend had played in my adventure. I could not stop her, and when I was called upon for details, gave them rather than seem to be secretive.

"We must be thankful that Brederode was taking his dip early," said Robert. "I will tell him this afternoon that we are very grateful for what he did."

I blushed consciously. "Oh, must you?" I asked. "Somehow, I've an idea he'll think it stupid of me to have mentioned it. Besides, maybe it wasn't your friend. Perhaps it was some one who looked like him. The—er—dress was so different, and I had hardly seen Mr. Brederode——"

"Jonkheer Brederode," corrected Freule Menela, softly.

I broke out laughing. "Jonkheer! Oh, do forgive me, but it sounds so funny. I really never could call a person Jonkheer, and take him seriously."

"You will have to call him Jonkheer when I bring him to the box, after he has finished his part in the Concours Hippique," said Robert. "There is no one who looks like Rudolph Brederode, so it must have been he. You can see this afternoon."

"But I don't want to see," I objected, crossly, for I felt I could not solemnly and adequately thank the young man before my listening relatives, for popping out of the sea in his microscopic costume, and coming to the rescue of me in mine. I had squeaked and curled up my toes, and been altogether ridiculous; and I knew we should at best burst out laughing in each other's faces—which would astonish the van Buren family.

"Whoever he was, I thanked him three times this morning, and that's enough," I went on. "He wasn't risking his life, you know, and really and truly, I'd rather not meet him formally, if you don't mind."

"Very well," said Cousin Robert, looking offended, and turning his attention to breakfast.

It was, when I came to notice it, the oddest breakfast imaginable, yet it had a tempting air. There was a tiny glass vase of flowers at each person's place, and the middle of the table was occupied by a china hen sitting on her nest. The eggs which she protected were hard-boiled; and ranged round the nest were platters of every kind of cold smoked meat, and cold smoked fish, dreamed of in the philosophy of cooks. There was also cold ham; and there were crisp, rich little rusks, and gingerbread in Japanese tin boxes, to eat with honey in an open glass dish, and there was coffee fit for gods and goddesses. Even Phil drank it, though she was offered tea, excusing her treachery by saying that she found her tastes were changing to suit the climate of Holland—a dangerous theory, since who can tell to what wild lengths it may lead?

When we had finished, the coffee-tray was taken from its place in front of Cousin Cornelia, and another tray, bearing two large china bowls of hot water, a dish with soap, a toy mop with a carved wood handle, and two towels, was substituted for it.

"I wash the fine china and the coffee-spoons myself, after breakfast," explained Cousin Cornelia, slipping off her rings, and beginning her pretty task. "The best of servants are not as careful as their mistresses, and it is a custom in Holland."

"But you didn't wash the coffee- and tea-cups last night after dinner," I reminded her.

"No," she replied, "I never do that."

"But isn't the china as valuable, and isn't there as much danger of it's being broken?"

She looked puzzled, almost distressed. "Yes, that is true," she admitted, "but—it is not a custom. I don't know why, but it never has been."

Her housewifely pleasure was spoiled for the moment, and I wished that I hadn't spoken.

After all, Lisbeth and Lilli were not to go with us to The Hague. This was the morning for opening the curio cabinets in the drawing-room, and washing the contents, and the girls were expected to help their mother. As the glass doors are never opened, unless that some guest may carefully handle a gold snuff-box, a miniature, or a bit of old Delft, the things could scarcely need washing; but the rule is to have them out once a month, and it would be a crime to break it. This Freule Menela explained in a low voice, and with the suspicion of a smile, as if she wished the two girls from London to understand that she was able to see the humorous side of these things.

"Your cousins are old-fashioned," she went on, "though dear people; I've known them since I was a child, and am fond of them for their own sakes as well as Robert's. You must not think that everybody in our country dines at five. For instance, if you visited in my set at The Hague, you would find things more as they are in France. When Robert and I are married I shall manage the house."

We listened civilly, but liked her none the better for her disavowal of van Buren ways.

"Horrid, snobbish, disloyal little wretch," said Phil, afterwards, quite viciously. "Your cousin's a hundred times too good and too good-looking for her; but she doesn't know that. She fancies herself superior, and thinks she's condescending to ally herself with the family. I do believe she's marrying your cousin for his money, and if she could get a chance to do better according to her ideas, she'd throw him over."

"It isn't likely she'll ever have another chance of any sort," said I; "Robert won't get rid of his bargain easily."

"She's going with us this morning, and makes a favor of it," went on Phil. "She says she's tired to death of the pictures; but I'm sure ten wild horses wouldn't keep her at home."

Be that as it may, the power of twenty wild horses in motor form rushed her away in our society and that of her fiancé.

In the beautiful forest, which I was happy in seeing again, we threaded intricate, dark avenues, and came at last (as if we had been a whole party of tourist princes in the tale of the "Sleeping Beauty") to the House in the Wood.

The romance of the place grew in my eyes, because a princess built it to please her husband, and because the husband was that son of William the Silent who best carried on his father's plans for Holland's greatness. I'm afraid I cared more about it for the sake of Princess Amalia and Frederic Henry of Orange, than for the sake of the Peace Conference, because the Conference was modern; and it was of the princess I thought as we passed through room after room of the charming old house, hidden in the very heart of the forest. Had she commanded the exquisite Chinese embroideries, the wonderful decorations from China and Japan, and the lovely old china? I wouldn't ask, for if she had had nothing to do with that part, I didn't wish to know.

In the octagonal Orange Salon where the twenty-six Powers met to make peace, and where the walls and cupola are a riot of paintings in praise of Frederic Henry and his relations, we strained our necks to see the pictures, and our brains to recall who the people were and what they had done; but even the portrait of Motley, which we'd just passed, and the knowledge that he wrote in this very house did not always prod our memories.

Robert would not let us stay long at the House in the Wood. He took us to see the site of the Palace of Peace, which Mr. Carnegie's money and a little of other people's will build, and then flashed us on to The Hague in time to reach the Mauritshuis as it opened.

Robert didn't pretend to know much about the pictures, though he was patriotically proud of them, as among the best to be found, if you searched the world. But the fiancée was in her element. "Tired to death" of these splendid things she might be, in her small soul, but she was determined to impress us with her artistic knowledge.

"I know exactly where all the best pictures are," she said, motioning away the official guides, "and I will take you to them."

She had a practical, energetic air, and her black eyes were sharp behind her pince-nez. I felt I could not be introduced by her to the glorious company of great men, and basely I slipped away from the party, leaving Phil to follow with outward humility and inward rebellion—a martyr to politeness.

Oh, how glad I was to be left alone with the pictures, with nobody to tell me anything about them! I flew back to buy a catalogue, and then, carefully dodging my friends, whose backs I spied from time to time, I gave myself up to happiness.

I didn't want to see the Madonnas and nymphs and goddesses, and Italian scenes, which a certain school conscientiously produced, because in their day it was the fashion. I wanted only the characteristically Dutch artists, the men who loved their dear Hollow Land, putting her beyond all, glorifying her, and painting what they knew with their hearts as well as eyes—the daily life of home; the rich brown dusk of humble rooms; the sea, the sky, the gentle, flat landscape, the pleasant domestic animals.

My acquaintance with Dutch art was made in London at the National Gallery; now I wanted to see it at home, and understand it as one can best understand it here.

I soon found the great Rembrandt—"the School of Anatomy," and stood for a long time looking at the wonderful faces—faces in whose eyes each thought lay clear to read. What a picture! A man who had done nothing else all his life long but paint just that, would have earned the right to be immortal; but to have been only twenty-six when he did it, and then to have gone on, through year after year, giving the world masterpieces, and to be repaid by that world in the end with poverty and hardship! My cheeks burned as I stood thinking of it, and somehow I felt guilty and responsible, as if I'd lived in Rembrandt's day, and been as ungrateful as the others.

I had expected to be disappointed in Paul Potter's "Bull," because people always speak of it at once, if they hear you are going to Holland; but if you could be disappointed in that young and winning beast who kindly stands there with diamonds in his great velvet eyes, and the breath coming and going under his rough, wholesome coat for you to look at and admire, when all the time you know that he could kill you if he liked, why, you would deserve to be gored by him and trodden by his companions.

How I wanted to have known Jan van Steen, and thanked him for his glorious, rollicking, extraordinary pictures (especially for "The Poultry Yard"), and have slyly stolen his bottle away from him sometimes, so that he might have painted even more, and not have come to ruin in the end! How I loved the gentle Van Ruysdaels, and how pathetic the everlasting white horse got to seem, after I had seen him repeated again and again in every sort of tender or eccentric landscape! Poor, tired white horse! I thought he must have been as weary of his journeyings as the Wandering Jew.

There are two Rubens in the Mauritshuis which intoxicated me, as if I'd been drinking new red wine; and there is one little Gerard Douw, above all other Gerard Douws, worth a three-days' journey on foot to see. In a window of the Bull's room I found it; and I stood so long staring, that at last I began to be afraid the others might have gone away. They came upon me, though, all too soon, and exclaimed, "Why, where have you been?" and "We've been looking for you everywhere." I said I was sorry, and wondered how I had been so stupid as to miss them. Then we were marshalled away by Robert for luncheon, as we'd been three hours in the Mauritshuis, and before long we must be driving to the Concours Hippique.

Only three hours in some of the best society on earth, and I shall be expected to tell about my impressions when I go back to England! I know well that I can tell nothing worth telling; and yet, even in this short time, I feel that I understand more about Holland and the Hollanders than I could have come to understand, except through their pictures—more even than Motley could have told me.

I said to myself as I went away from the galleries, that Dutch painting would stand for me henceforth as an epitome of the Dutch people. No one but the Dutch could have painted pictures like theirs—so quaint, so painstaking, and at the same time so splendid. Their love of rich brown shadow and amber light was learned in the dim little rooms of their own homes, and of inns where the brass and pewter gleamed in the mellow dusk of raftered kitchens, and piles of fruit and vegetables fell like jewels, from paniers such as Gerard Douw took three days to paint on a scale of three inches.

We had a hasty luncheon at a nice hotel with an air of Parisian gaiety about it, and sped away in the motor to the Horse Show, which was to be held in a park between The Hague and Scheveningen. It was advertised on every wall and hoarding, even on lamp-posts, and Freule Menela (gorgeous in a Paris frock and tilted hat) prophesied that, as the Queen and Prince Consort were honoring the occasion, we should see the loveliest women, handsomest men, and prettiest dresses, as well as the best horses that Holland could produce.

"When I say Holland, I mean The Hague; it is the same thing," she added, with a conceited toss of the chin; and I thought she deserved shaking for her sly dig at Robert of Rotterdam, than whom there can be no handsomer young man in the Netherlands.

Cousin Cornelia in filmy gray, and the twins radiant as fresh-plucked roses in their white frocks and Leghorn hats, had arrived, and were in one of the many long, open loggias close to the red-and-gold pavilion which was ready for the Royalties.

Over the pavilion, with its gilded crown and crest, floated the orange flag as well as the tricolor of Holland; everywhere flags were waving and red bunting glowing, and there was far more effect of color than at an English race-meeting. Every box, every seat, was full; pretty hats nodded like flowers in a huge parterre swept by a breeze; smart-looking men with women in trailing white walked about the lawns; and Robert and Menela pointed out the celebrities—ambassadors and ambassadors' wives, politicians, popular actresses, celebrated journalists, men of title or wealth who owned horses and gave their lives to sport.

All the men of the haut mond were in frock-coats and tall hats, and most of them looked English. There were few of the type which I preconceived as Dutch, yet I saw faces in the crowd which Rembrandt or Rubens might have used as models; thin, dark faces; hard, shrewd faces, with long noses and pointed chins; good-natured round faces, with wide-open gray eyes; important, conceited faces like the burgomasters in ancient portraits.

"Not a type has changed," I said to myself. "These people of to-day are the same people who suffered torture smiling, who were silent on the rack, who drove the Spaniards out of their land, and swept the English from the seas."

This was my mood when a stir among the throng heralded the coming of the Queen, and I applauded as patriotically as a Dutchwoman the young daughter of the brave house of Orange and Nassau.

She had a fine procession, and made an effective entrance through the wide gates that swung apart to let in her outriders in their green livery, and the royal coaches, with powdered coachmen and footmen in blazing red and gold. A charming young woman she looked, too, in her blowing white cloud of chiffon and lace, and ostrich-plumes. While she circled round the drive with her suite, I heard the Dutch National Hymn for the first time, and also a soft and plaintive air which is the Queen's own—a kind of "entrance music" which follows her about through life, like the music for a leading actress on the stage.

When the Queen in her white dress, the stout, bland Prince Consort in his blue uniform, and the ladies of the Court were settled under the crimson curtains of the pavilion, officers who were competing in the Horse Show—Hollanders in green and cerise, and plain blue; Belgians in blue and red; two or three Danes in delicious azure—were brought up with much ceremony to be introduced.

"There goes Rudolph Brederode," said Robert, a light of friendly admiration kindling in his eyes for a tall, slim figure in black coat and riding-breeches. "See, her Majesty is wishing him good luck. He—" But my cousin glanced at me, and remembering my base ingratitude, decided that I deserved no further information about his hero, who ought to be my hero too.

I pretended not to hear, and watched the show of beautiful horses and carriages. They went round and round the great grassy ring, each driver (and some of them were English) taking off their top-hats in front of the Royal Pavilion.

There was a good deal of this kind of entertainment, but the best part of the show was saved for the last, when all the glittering carriages had disappeared from the course. Then came the jumping competition, in which the finest riders, officers and civilians, were to prove what they and their horses could do.

The crowd had wearied of the long driving contests, but as the Dutch soldiers ran out across the grass to take their places beside the hedges, hurdles, water-jumps, and obstacles, there was a general brisking up.

Then began the real excitement of the afternoon. People greeted their favorites with applause, and Cousin Robert's hero had the largest share. He made a splendid figure on his delicately shaped roan, a creature all verve and muscle like his master, graceful as a cat, and shining in the sun with the rich effulgence of a chestnut fresh from the burr.

I couldn't help a jumping of the pulses when the bell rang, and the good-looking young men on their grand horses cantered into the ring. Rudolph Brederode was the last, and his horse came in on its hind legs, pawing and prancing with sheer joy of life and its own beauty; yet what a different beast from that other who had also pirouetted to the sound of music in the morning! I wondered if William the Silent thought—but of course he didn't.

One by one the horses started, urged on or held back by their riders. All rode well, but not one got round the course without a fault—a jump short at a ditch; a hind hoof that brushed a hedge; the ring of an iron shoe on a hurdle; or a wooden brick sent flying from the top row on a high wall; not one, until Rudolph Brederode's turn came.

At the last moment, a pat of his hand on his horse's satin shoulder quieted the splendid creature's nerves. Instantly it was calm, and coming down from fun to business, started off at the daintest of canters, which broke at exactly the right second into a noble bound. Without a visible effort the adorable beast rose for each obstacle, floating across hedges and walls as if it had been borne by the wings of Pegasus. The last, widest water-jump was taken with one long, flying leap; and then, doffing his hat low to the Royal Box, the conqueror rode away in a storm of applause.

"It's always like that. Brederode never fails in anything he undertakes," said Robert, as happy as if he, and not his friend, had been the victor. "I'm off to congratulate him now."

Two minutes later I saw the hero among the crowd, his head towering above most other heads; then I lost sight of him, and turned again to watch the course, for the riding was not nearly finished yet. But with the triumph of the great Water Beggar's descendant, the best was over. No one else did as well as he, or had as fine a horse, and I found myself looking for him and Robert. Maybe Robert would bring him to the box in spite of all. It was a pity the others should be cheated of a word with him—which even the twins seemed to hope for—just because Robert had to punish me.

But he did not come, nor did Robert until after the Royalties had gone, and Cousin Cornelia was ready to go too.

RUDOLPH BREDERODE'S POINT OF VIEW

VIII

I don't often do things that I have set my mind against doing, but when Destiny lays a hand on one's steering-gear, unexpected things happen.

My idea has always been that, when my time came to fall seriously in love, the girl would be a Dutch girl. I like and respect Dutch girls. When you want them, there they are. There's no nonsense in them—at least, as little as possible, considering that they are females. They don't fuss about their temperaments, and imagine themselves Mysteries, and Chameleons, and Anomalies, and make themselves and their lovers miserable by trying to be inscrutable. You can generally tell pretty well what they are going to do next, and if you don't want them to, you can prevent them from doing it. Also they have good nerves and good complexions, and for these reasons, and many others, make perfect wives for men with family traditions to keep up. That is why I always intended to fall seriously in love with a Dutch girl, although my mother was an Englishwoman, and her father (an English earl who thought England the only land) made an American heiress his Countess.

More than once I've come near to carrying out my intention, but the feeling I had, never seemed the right feeling, so I let the matter drop, and waited for next time.

A few days ago, I found out that there would never be a next time. I knew this when Rob van Buren spoke of the two girls who were with him at the Prinzenhof on July tenth as his "American cousin and an English friend."

I can never fall in love with a Dutch girl now, for I have done the thing I did not mean to do, and it can't be undone in this world. Once and for all, that is settled, however it may go with me where the girl is concerned. But it will go hard if I do not have her in the end, and I shall if she is to be got; for the men of my blood soon make up their minds when they want a thing, and they do not rest much until it's theirs. This peculiarity has often landed them in trouble in past times, and may land me in trouble now; but I'm ready for the risk, as they were.

I didn't know at first which was the English girl—my girl with the chestnut hair, dark hazel eyes, and rose and white complexion; or the other girl with brown hair, eyes of violet, and skin of cream. But when I encountered my girl in the sea at half-past six in the morning, unchaperoned except by a foolish runaway horse attached to a bathing-machine, I should have guessed that she was the American, even if there had been nothing in her pretty voice to suggest it.

I am sorry that it couldn't have been the other way round, for my English mother's sake, since my fate isn't to be Dutch. But it can't be helped. I have seen The One Girl, and it would be the same if she were a Red Indian.

I was going to lead up to the subject when van Buren came to speak to me at the Horse Show; but he began it, by thanking me, in the grave way he has, for coming to his cousin's rescue in the morning. I shouldn't have referred to that little business, as she might not have mentioned her adventure; but as she had told the story, it gave me a foundation to work on.

I said truly that what I had done was nothing, but hinted that I should be pleased to meet the young lady again; and thereupon expected an invitation to visit his mother's box. To my surprise, it didn't come, and Robert's face showed that there was a reason why.

"My cousin doesn't deserve that you should take an interest in her," he blurted out. "She is pretty, yes, and perhaps that is why she is so spoiled, for she is vain and capricious and flippant. I wish it were Miss Rivers who had our blood in her veins."

Queerly enough, instead of cooling me off toward the girl, Robert's criticism of her had the opposite effect. I have liked Robert since I took him under my wing during my last and his first year at Leiden. Perhaps it tickles my vanity to know that he has been boyish enough to make me into a kind of hero, little though I deserve it, and whenever I have been able to do him a good turn I have done it; but suddenly I found myself thinking him a young brute, and feeling that he deserved kicking.

"I suppose Miss Van Buren hasn't paid enough attention to your High Mightiness," said I.

"She hasn't put herself out much," said he; "but it isn't that I care about, it's her attitude toward you. Of course you couldn't help hearing what she said yesterday at the Prinzenhof about the portrait of William the Silent. Because I asked her afterwards if she didn't think it looked like you, she said not a bit; anyhow she had only been joking, and it was an ugly portrait. Then, this morning at breakfast, when I heard what happened on the beach, I told her that perhaps she would have the chance this afternoon to thank you. Instead of being pleased, she answered that she'd thanked you enough already, that you had run no risk, as what you did was nothing much, after all, and she hoped I wouldn't bring you. I tell you, Brederode, I could have boxed her ears."

I must confess that mine tingled, and for a moment I felt hurt and angry with the girl, but it was only for a moment. Then I laughed.

"Served you right for forcing me upon her," said I. "Well, it's evident she's taken a dislike to me. It must be my business to change that, for I have exactly the opposite feelings toward her. Some day I shall make her like me."

"I wonder you can think it worth while to trouble your head over my cousin, after what I've felt it right to tell you," said Robert. "I thought you ought to know, otherwise you would have considered it strange I didn't ask you to our box, as I should have been proud to do; but I was angry for your sake, and said I wouldn't bring you near her. Now, as things are, I don't see how you can meet my cousin. The van Buren blood is at its worst in her, and it has made her obstinate as a pig."

"Heavens, what a simile!" said I; yet I couldn't help laughing. "I, too, am obstinate as a pig; and being proud of my Dutch blood, I like her the better for hers, all the more because it's obstinate blood, and it wouldn't be true Dutch if it were not. I tell you, Robert, I'm going to know your cousin—not through you; I don't want that now, but in some other way, which will arrange itself sooner or later—probably sooner."

"I don't see how," Robert repeated. "I was in hopes that she and Miss Rivers, her stepsister, could have been persuaded by my mother to pay us a long visit, and give up an objectionable plan they have. But Cousin Helen—Nell, as Miss Rivers calls her—has been pig-headed even with my mother. I am sure it is not Miss Rivers's fault. She is not that kind of girl."

"Do you mind telling me the objectionable plan?" I asked.

"I shall be glad to tell," said he, "and see if you don't agree with me that it is monstrous, though, strange to say, now mother has talked with the girls, she does not seem to think it as bad as she was inclined to at first. She tells me that they are determined to persist, and she thinks they will come to no harm. My cousin has been left a motor-boat by a friend's will. You must have seen it: Captain Noble's 'Lorelei,' which used to lie near the Rowing Club. She and Miss Rivers have come to take a trip through the waterways of Holland, though my mother has learned that their financial circumstances hardly warrant such an undertaking."

"Plucky girls!" was my comment.

"Ah, but you don't know all. A young man is going with them, a strange American young man, whom they never saw till yesterday."

"By Jove! In what capacity—as chauffeur?"

"Not at all. As a sort of paying guest, so far as I can understand the arrangement."

"It sounds rather an odd one."

"I should say so; but I mustn't make you think it's worse than it is. There was a misunderstanding about the boat. The American thought he'd hired it from the caretaker, and they were sorry for his disappointment. He has an aunt, a Scotswoman of title, who is to be of the party."

"That makes all the difference, doesn't it?—not the title, but the aunt."

"It makes a difference, certainly; but the man may be an adventurer. He's an artist, it appears, named Starr——"

"What, the Starr whose Salon picture made so much talk in Paris this spring?"

"Yes; but being a good artist doesn't constitute him a good man. He might make love to the girls."

"Beast! So he might, aunt or no aunt. She'll probably aid and abet him. I don't know that I blame you for objecting to such an adventure for your cousin."

"Oh, it isn't so much for her—that is, except on principle. But I've done all I can, and my mother has done all she can, so you can imagine what my cousin's pig-headedness is like to resist us both. My mother tells me she could do nothing with her; and the girls are leaving us to-morrow. They go back to Rotterdam, where they expect to find Starr's aunt, and, they hope, a skipper for the motor-boat. Cousin Helen asked if I could recommend a suitable man; but even if I knew one, I should not make it easier for her to flout the wishes of the family."

"Naturally not," said I, with the sort of fellow-feeling for Robert which makes one wondrous kind. And I was sure that if I were Miss Van Buren's cousin, and had set myself against her doing a certain thing, she would not have done it.

"However, they are returning to Rotterdam early in the morning, and that being the case, as I was saying, I don't see how it will be possible for you to meet my cousin."

"I bet that I will meet her, and be properly introduced, too, before either of us is a week older," said I, and then was sorry I had clothed my resolve in such crude words. But it was too late to explain or apologize, for at that instant two or three men came up. The thought of what I had blurted out lay heavy on my mind afterwards, and if it had not seemed a far-fetched and even school-missish thing to do, I would have sent a line to Robert asking him to erase that clumsy and impertinent boast from his memory. If he is stupid enough or awkward enough to repeat anything of our conversation, and give Miss Van Buren the impression that I tried to make a wager concerning her, it will be all up with me, I know.

As it is, I can only hope that my words will go out at one ear as fast as they went in at the other.

Next morning I had made no definite plan of action, but thought that as Miss Van Buren was going to Rotterdam, it could do no harm for me to go to Rotterdam too, and see what would happen next. Things of some sort were bound to happen, and one way or other my chance might come before she started on her journey.

My mother is at Château Liliendaal, the place where she likes best to spend July and August when we don't run over to England; but she didn't expect me to join her for some days, and meanwhile I was free to do as I chose.

I was in hopes that I might see Miss Van Buren in the train, if I took the most popular one in the morning; but she and her stepsister were not on board, so I fancied Robert must be driving them back in the borrowed car, despite his objections to their proceedings.

I went straight to the Rowing Club, where I have several friends, and as I knew from Robert that the motor-boat was 'Lorelei' I easily found out where she was lying. The next thing was to go and have a look at her, to see if preparations were being made for an immediate start.

I had forgotten what she was like, but I found her a handsome little craft, with two cabins, and deck-room to accommodate four or five passengers; also I learned from a man employed on the quay close by that the motor was an American one of thirty horse-power. He told me as well, by way of gossip, that a rakish barge, moored with her pert brass nose almost on "Lorelei's" stern, had been hired, and would be towed by the owners of the motor-boat.

I didn't know what to make of this bit of information, as Robert had not mentioned a barge; but the skylight meant a studio, so I saw the man Starr's hand in the arrangement, and began to hate the fellow.

By the time I had loitered in the neighborhood for half an hour or more, it was noon, and it occurred to me that I might go and lunch at Miss Van Buren's hotel. But this would look like dogging the girl's footsteps, and eventually I decided upon a more subtle means of gaining my end.

Nevertheless, I strolled past the house; but, seeing nobody worth seeing, I reluctantly turned my steps farther on to a garden restaurant—a middle-class place, with tables under chestnuts and beeches or in shady arbors for parties of two or four.

It was early still, but the restaurant is popular, and all the small tables under the trees were appropriated. Fortunately, several arbors were empty, although one or two were engaged, and I walked into the first I came to.

For a few moments I was kept waiting, then a fluent waiter appeared to recommend the most desirable dishes of the day. His eloquence was in full tide, when a man paused before the entrance of my arbor, hesitated, and went on to the next.

"That is engaged, sir," called out the waiter.

"I don't understand Dutch," answered the new-comer in American-English. "Can you speak French?"

The waiter could, and did. The man—a good-looking fellow, with singularly brilliant black eyes and a fetching smile—explained that it was he who had engaged the arbor, that he was expecting a lady, and would not order luncheon until she joined him.

He sat down with his gray flannel back to me, but I could see him through the screen of leaves and lattice, and it was clear that he was nervous. He kept jumping up, going to the doorway, staring out, and returning to throw himself on the hard green bench with an impatient sigh. Evidently She was late.

An omelet arrived for me, and still my neighbor was alone; but I had scarcely taken up my fork when a light, tripping step sounded crisply on the crushed sea-shells of the path outside. A shadow darkened the doorway, and for an instant a pocket-edition of a woman, in a neat but well-worn tailor-made dress, hung on my threshold. Rather like a trim gray sparrow she was, expecting a crumb, then changing her mind and hopping further on to find it.

But the change of mind came only with the springing up of the young man in the adjoining arbor.

"Aunt Fay, is that you?" he inquired, in an anxious voice, speaking the name with marked emphasis.

"Oh!" chirped the gray sparrow, flitting to the next doorway, "I must have counted wrong. I saw a young man alone, and—Then you are my nephew—Ronald."

She also threw stress upon the name and the relationship, and, though I knew nothing of the face that lurked behind a tissue veil, I became aware that the lady was an American.

"Funny thing," I said to myself. "They don't seem to have met before. She must be a long-lost aunt."

My neighbor would have ushered his relative into the arbor, but she lingered outside.

"Come, Tibe," she cried, with a shrill change of tone. "Here, Tibe, Tibe, Tibe!"

There was a sudden stir in the garden, a pulling of chairs closer to small tables, a jumping about of waiters, a few stifled shrieks in feminine voices, and a powerful tan-colored bulldog, with a peculiarly concentrated and earnest expression on his countenance, bounded through the crowd toward his mistress, with a fine disregard of obstacles. Evidently, if there was any dodging to be done, he had been brought up to expect others to do it; and I thought the chances were that he would seldom be disappointed.

There was a sudden stir in the garden

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Nephew Ronald, as the monster cannoned against him. "You didn't mention This."

"No; I knew you were sure to love him. I wouldn't have anything to do with a creature who didn't. Isn't he exquisite?"

"He's a dream," said the young man; but he did not specify what kind of dream.

"Where I go, there Tibe goes also," went on the lady. "His name is Tiberius, but it's rather long to say when he's doing something that you want him to stop. He'll lunch with us like a perfect gentleman. Oh, he is more flower than dog! Tibe, come away from that door instantly!"

The flower had paused to see whether he approved of my lunch, and from the way he turned back a protruding black drapery of underlip from a pair of upstanding ivory tusks, I judged that neither it nor I found favor in his eyes. Perhaps he resented laughter in mine; yet there was something after all in the flower simile, if not precisely what the blossom's adoring mistress meant. Tibe's face distinctly resembled a pansy, but an appalling pansy, the sort of pansy you would not like to meet in the dark.

Whatever may have been his opinion of me, he had to be dragged by the collar from my door, and later I caught the glitter of his gaze through the lattice.

Aunt Fay slipped in between bench and table, sitting down opposite to me, and when the nephew took his old place I had glimpses of her over his shoulder.

She was unfastening her veil. Now it had fallen. Alas for any hopes which the trim, youthful figure might have raised! Her thick gray hair was plastered down over temples, cheeks, and ears, and a pair of uncommonly large blue spectacles left her eyes to the imagination.

"I began to be afraid there might have been some mistake in the telegram I sent, after I got your letter saying I mustn't come to your address," began Nephew Ronald, hastily, after a moment of silence that followed the dropping of the veil. "What I said was, 'Buiten Oord, third arbor on the left as you come in by main entrance, lunch quarter past twelve. Any cabman will know the place.' Was the message all right?"

"Yes," replied Aunt Fay; "but I suffer a little with my eyes. That's why I stopped when I came to the next arbor. I'm late, because darling Tibe ran away just as I was hailing a cab, so I had to let that one go, and rescue him from the crowd. Wherever he goes he has a throng round him. People admire him so much. Down, my angel! You mustn't put your feet on strange gentlemen's tables, when you're invited to lunch. He's hungry, poor lamb."

"I hope you are also," said Nephew, politely; but his voice was heavy. I wondered if he were disappointed in Aunt, or if it was only that the Pansy had got on his nerves. "Here's my waiter. We'll have something to eat, and talk things over as we lunch. There's a tremendous menu for a table d'hôte meal—thoroughly Dutch. No other people could get through it and live. Probably you would prefer——"

"Let me see. Potage d'Artois; Caneton de Luxembourg; Soles aux fines herbes; Pommes Natures; Fricandeau de Veau; Haricots Princesse; Poulet roti; Compote; Homard frais; Sauce Ravigottes; Salad melé; Crême au chocolat; Fromage; Fruit. Humph, funnily arranged, isn't it? But Tibe and I have been living in furnished lodgings, and we—er—have eaten rather irregularly. I dare say between us we might manage the lunch as it is."

Nephew Ronald ordered it, and another silence fell. I think that he drummed on the table.

"We might as well get to business," suggested the lady. "Does the aunt engagement begin immediately?"

"I—er—there's one difficulty," faltered the young man. "Unfortunately I injudiciously let drop that my aunt was a fine woman."

"Really! You might better have waited till you made her acquaintance. You can't pick and choose in a hurry, when you must have a ready-made aunt, my dear sir. Myself, I prefer small women. They are more feminine."

"Please don't be angry. You see, it was like this. I said that, when I still hoped to have a real aunt on hand for my purpose. That was the way the scrape began. I inadvertently let out her name and a lot of things——"

"To the young ladies I'm to chaperon?"

"Yes, to the young ladies. If they remember the description——"

"You can say you referred to your aunt's character when you remarked that she was a fine woman."

"I suppose so" (still doubtfully). "But then there's another trouble, you know. I advertised in Het Nieus van den Dag for a Scotch aunt."

I moved suddenly, for a queer thought jumped into my head. The blue spectacles were focused on me, and there was a low murmur, to which the man responded in his usual tone. "No danger. Dutch. I heard him talking to the waiter."

Now, perhaps I should have called through the lattice and the leaves: "Combination of Dutch and English. Half and half. As much at home in one language as the other." But for several reasons I was silent. One was, that it was easier to be silent than to make a fuss. Another was that, if the suspicion which had just sprung into my head had any foundation, it was mine or any man's duty to know the truth and act upon it. So I sat still, and went on with my luncheon as my next door neighbors went on with theirs; and no one remembered my existence except Tibe.

"I've no moral objection to being a Scotch aunt," said the obliging lady.

"It's your accent, not your morals, that sticks in my throat."

"The latter, I trust were sufficiently vouched for in the letter from our American Consul here. You can call on him if you choose. Few ready-made aunts obtained by advertisement would have what I have to recommend me. As for a Scotch accent, I've bought Burns, and a Crockett in Tauchnitz, and by to-morrow I'll engage that no one—unless a Scotsman—would know me from a Scotswoman. Hoot, awa', mon. Come ben."

"But—er—my aunt's rather by way of being a swell. She wouldn't be found dead saying 'hoot, awa', 'or 'come ben.' There's just a little indescribable burr-r——"

"Then I will have just a little indescribable burr-r. And you can buy me a Tartan blouse and a Tam."

"I'm afraid a Tam wouldn't—wouldn't quite suit your style, or—or that of any well-regulated aunt; and a well-regulated aunt is absolutely essential to the situation. I——"

"Do you mean to insinuate that I am not a well-regulated aunt?" There was a rustling in the arbor. "Come, Tibe," the lady added in a firm voice, "you and I will go away and leave this gentlemen to select from all the other charming and eligible aunts who have no doubt answered his quite conventional and much-to-be-desired advertisement."

"For heaven's sake, don't go!" cried the man, springing to his feet. "There, your dog's got the duck. But it doesn't matter. Nobody else worth speaking of—nobody in any way possible—has answered my advertisement. I can't lose you. But, you see, I somehow fancied from your letter that you were large and imposing, just what I wanted; and you said you'd lately been in Scotland——"

"The accent was one of the few things I did not wish to bring away with me," sniffed the lady. "Under the table, Tibe; we're not going, after all, for the moment. And as you have the duck, you may as well eat it."

"Good dog," groaned the stricken young man. If he had not, to the best of my belief, been engaged in concocting a treacherous plot against one whom I intended to protect, I could have pitied him.

Both sat down again. There was a pause while plates were changed, and then the female plotter took up the running.

"I may be conceited," said she, "but my opinion is that you're very lucky to get me. I may not be Scotch, and I may not be a 'swell,' but I am—a lady."

"Oh—of course."

"What were the others like who answered your advertisement?"

"All Dutch, and spoke broken English, except one, who was German. She wore a reform dress, hunched up behind with unspeakable elastic things. You'd make allowances if you knew what I've gone through since the day before yesterday, when I found, after telegraphing a frantic appeal to my aunt in Scotland, that she's left home and they could give me no address. I've had an awful time. My nerves are shattered."

"Then you'd better secure peace by securing me. An aunt in the hand is worth two in the bush."

"A good aunt needs no bush. I mean—oh, I don't know what I mean; but, of course, I ask nothing better than to secure you."

"No; you mean you think you'll get nothing better. Ha, ha! I agree with you. But Tibe and I didn't come here to be played with. You're giving us a very good lunch, but I have his future and mine to think of. I admit, I'm in want of an engagement as a traveling companion to ladies in Holland; but you aren't the only person to whom it occurs to put ads in Dutch papers. If you'd searched the columns of Het Nieus van den Dag you might have seen mine. I have not been without answers, and I don't know that I should care to be an aunt, anyway. It makes one seem so old. What I came to say was that, unless you can offer me an immediate engagement——"

"Oh, I can and do. I beg of you to be my aunt from this moment."

"Tibe to travel with me and have every comfort?"

"Yes, yes, and luxury."

"A pint of warm milk every morning, half a pound of best beef or chicken with vegetables at noon, two new-laid eggs at——"

"Certainly. He has but to choose—he seems to know his own mind pretty well."

"I don't think it a subject for joking. That duck was close to the edge of the table. We'd better talk business. Your letter said a hundred gulden a week to a suitable aunt, and a two months' engagement certain. Well, it's not enough. I should want at least three hundred dollars extra, down in advance (I can't do it in gulden in my head) for your sake."

"For my sake?"

"Don't you see, to do you credit as a relative, I must have things, nice things, plenty of nice things? Tartan blouses, and if not Tams, cairngorms. Yes, a cairngorm brooch would be realistic. I saw a beauty yesterday—only two hundred gulden. No aunt of yours can go for a trip on the waterways of Holland unless she's well fitted out."

"I've been admiring the dress you are wearing. It's wonderfully trim."

"Thanks. But it happens to be about a hundred years old, and is the only one I have left. As for my hat, and boots—but Tibe and I have suffered some undeserved vicissitudes of late."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Of course you must have three hundred dollars to begin with."

"By the way, am I Mrs. or Miss?"

"You must know best as to——"

"I mean me in the part of your aunt."

"Oh, you're neither Miss nor Mrs."

"Really!"

"I mean, you're married, but you have a title."

"That will come more expensive. A person of title should have a diamond guard for her wedding-ring. You feel that, don't you?"

"Now you speak of it, I do."

"Would you like her to wear a cap for indoors?"

"Sounds as if she were a parlormaid——"

"Not at all. I'm sure a proper Scotch aunt would wear a cap."

"Mine's a proper Scotch aunt, and she doesn't. She's about forty, but she looks twenty-five. Nobody would believe she was anybody's aunt."

"But you want everybody to believe I'm yours?"

"Oh, have a cap by all means."

"It should be real lace."

"Buy it."

"And another to change with."

"Buy that too. Get a dozen if you like."

"Thanks, I will. I believe you just said the engagement dates from to-day?"

"Rather. I was going to tell you, I must have an aunt by this evening. She arrives from Scotland, you know."

"With her dog. That's easy."

"I hope the girls like dogs."

"They do if they're nice girls."

"They're enchanting girls, one English, one American. I adore both: that's why I'm a desperate man where an aunt's concerned. To produce an aunt is my one hope of enjoying their society on the motor-boat trip I wrote you about. I wouldn't do this thing if I weren't desperate, and even desperate as I am, I wouldn't do it if I couldn't have got an all-right kind of aunt, an aunt that—that——"

"That an unimpeachable American Consul could vouch for. I assure you, Nephew, you ought to think of a woman like me as of—of a ram caught in the bushes."

"I'm willing to think of you in that way, if it's not offensive. The Consul didn't go into particulars——"

"That was unnecessary."

"Perhaps. Everything's settled, then. I'll count you out five hundred dollars in gulden. Buy what you choose—so long as it's aunt-like. I'll meet your train at—we'll say seven, the Beurs Station."

"I understand. I'll be there with Tibe and our luggage. But you haven't told me your name yet. I signed my letter to you, Mary Milton. You cautiously——"

"Ronald L. Starr is your nephew's name. Lady MacNairne is my aunt's."

I came very near choking myself with a cherry-stone. Long before this I'd been sure of his name, but I hadn't expected to hear Lady MacNairne's.

"Forty, and looks twenty-five."

Yes, that was a fair description of Lady MacNairne, as far as it went; but much more might be said by her admirers, of whom I openly declared myself one, before a good-sized audience at a country house in Scotland, not quite a year ago.

It was merely a little flirtation, to pass the time, on both our parts. A woman of forty who is a beauty and a flirt has no time to waste, and Lady MacNairne is not wasteful. She was the handsomest woman at Kinloch Towers, my cousin Dave Norman's place, and a Dutchman was a novelty to her; so we amused ourselves for ten days, and I should have kept the pleasantest memory of the episode if Sir Alec had not taken it into his head to be jealous.

Poor Fleda MacNairne was whisked away before the breaking-up of the house-party, and that is the last I have seen of her, but not the last I've heard. Once in a while I get a letter, amusing, erratic, like herself; and in such communications she doesn't scruple to chronicle other flirtations which have followed hard on mine. Only a short time before the making of this plot in a Rotterdam garden, a letter from her gave startling news: consequently I am now in possession of knowledge apparently denied to the nephew.

A few minutes more and the pair in the next arbor separated, the woman departing to purchase the fittings of aunthood, the man remaining to pay the bill. But before he had time to beckon the waiter I got up and walked into his lair.

"Mr. Starr," I said, "I'm going to stop your game."

"The devil you are! And who are you?" answered he, first staring, then flushing.

"My name's Rudolph Brederode," said I.

"You're a d—d eavesdropper," said he.

"You are the same kind of a fool, for thinking because your neighbor spoke Dutch he couldn't know English. I sat still and let you go on, because I don't mean to allow any of the persons concerned to be imposed upon by you."

He glared at me across the table as if he could have killed me, and I glared back at him; yet all the while I was conscious of a sneaking kindness for the fellow, he looked so stricken—rather like an endearing scamp of an Eton boy who has got into a horrid scrape, and is being hauled over the coals by the Head.

"What business is it of yours?" he wanted to know.

"Lady MacNairne's a friend of mine."

"Indeed! But what of that? She's my aunt."

"And Robert van Buren is another friend, an intimate one. He has told me about his cousin's motor-boat. He doesn't approve of the tour, as it is. When he hears from me——"

"Oh, hang it all, why do you want to be such a spoilsport?" demanded the poor wretch in torture. "Did you never fall in love with a girl, and feel you'd do anything to get her?"

This sudden change, this throwing himself upon my mercy, took me somewhat aback. In threatening to tear the mote from his eye, what about a certain obstruction in mine?

He was quick to see his advantage and follow it up.

"You say you heard everything. Then you must see why I thought of this plan. I hoped at first Aunt Fleda might be prevailed on to come. When I lost that hope I just couldn't give up the trip. I had to get an aunt to chaperon those blessed girls, or it was good-by to them, for me. What harm am I doing? The woman's respectable; the Consul has written me a letter about her. If you know Aunt Fay—that's my name for her—you know she would call this the best kind of a lark. I'll confess to her some day. I'd have my head cut off sooner than injure Miss Rivers or Miss Van Buren. Afterwards, when we've got to be great friends, they shall hear the whole story, I promise; but of course, you can ruin me if you tell them, or let your friend tell them, at this stage. Do you think it's fair to take advantage of what you overheard by accident, and spoil the chance of my life? Oh, say now, what can I do to make you keep still?"

"Well, I'm—hanged!" was all I could answer. And a good deal to my own surprise, I heard myself suddenly burst into sardonic laughter.

Then he laughed, too, and we roared together. If any one noticed us, they must have thought us friends of a lifetime; yet five minutes ago we had been like dogs ready to fly at each other's throats, and there was no earthly reason why we should not be of the same mind still.

"You are going to let me alone, aren't you?" he continued to plead, when he was calmer. "You are going to do unto me as you'd be done by, and give my true love a chance to run smooth? If you refuse, I could wish that fearful Flower back that I might set him at you."

My lips twitched. "I'm not sure," said I, "whether you ought to be in a gaol or in the school-room."

"I ought to be on a motor-boat tour with the two most charming girls in the world; and if I'm not to be there, I might as well be in my grave. Do ask people about me. Ask my aunt. I'm not a villain. I'm one of the nicest fellows you ever met, and I've no bad intentions. I've got too much money to be an adventurer. Why, look here! I'm supposed to be quite a good match. Either of the girls can have me and my millions. Both are at the feet of either. At present I've no choice. Don't drive me to drink. I should hate to die of Schnapps; and there's nothing else liquid I could well die of in Holland."

As he talked, I had been thinking hard and fast. I should have to spare him. I saw that. But—I saw something else too.

"I'll keep your ridiculous secret, Mr. Starr, on one condition," I said.

"You've only to name it."

"Invite me to go with you on the trip."

"My dear fellow, for heaven's sake don't ask me the one thing I can't do. It's cruelty to animals. It isn't my trip. I'm a guest. Perhaps you don't understand——"

"Yes, I do. Van Buren told me. He mentioned that you hadn't been able to get a skipper to take the motor-boat through the canals."

"That's true. But we shan't be delayed. We have our choice between two chaps with fair references; not ideal men, perhaps; but you don't need an admiral to get you through a herring-pond——"

"Each canal is different from every other. You must have a first-rate man, who knows every inch of the way, whatever route you choose, or you'll get into serious trouble. Now, as you've been praising yourself, I'll follow your example. You couldn't find a skipper who knows more about 'botoring' and Dutch waterways than I do, and I volunteer for the job. I go if you go; there's the offer."

"Are you serious?" All his nonsense was suddenly forgotten.

"Absolutely."

"Why do you want to go? You must have a reason."

"I have. It's much the same as yours."

"I'm blowed! Then you've met—Them."

"I've seen them. Apparently that's about all you've done."

"You mean, if I won't get you on board as skipper you'll give me away?"

I was silent. I did not now mean anything of the kind, for it would be impossible to betray the engaging wretch. But I was willing that he should think my silence gave consent.

"They would know you weren't a common hired skipper. How could I explain you?"

"Why, say you've a Dutch friend who has—kindly offered to go, as you can't find any one else who's competent for the job. You'd better not mention your friend's name at first, if you can avoid it. As the ladies have been anxious about the skipper, and asked van Buren to get one, they'll probably be thankful it's all right, and only too glad to accept a friend of yours in the place."

"Poor, deceived angels! What's to prevent your snatching one of them from under my very nose?"

"You must run the risk of that. Besides, you needn't worry about it till you make up your mind which angel you want."

"I should naturally want whichever one you did. We are made like that."

"If you don't agree, and they go 'botoring' without you, you can't get either."

"That's true. Most disagreeable things are. And there's just a chance, if you get dangerous, that Tibe might polish you off. I saw the way he looked at you. Well, needs must when somebody drives. It's a bargain then. I'll tell the girls what a kind, generous Dutch friend I have. We'll be villains together."

IX

We settled that Starr should see Miss Van Buren and Miss Rivers and tell them that skipper, chauffeur, and chaperon all being provided, there was nothing to prevent the tour beginning to-morrow. Having done this, without bringing in his obliging friend's name, he was to meet me at the Rowing Club at three o'clock with a detailed report of all that had happened up to date.

Never was time slower in passing. Each minute seemed as long as the dying speech of a tragedian who fancies himself in a death scene. I wanted to use some of these minutes in writing to Robert, but it would be premature to tell him that I was going to look after his cousin and her sister on the trip, as the ladies might abandon it, rather than put up with my society.

When ten minutes past three came, and no Starr, I was certain that they would not have me. I could hardly have been gloomier if I'd been waiting for a surgical operation. But another five minutes brought my confederate, and the first sight of his face sent my spirits up with a bound.

"It's all right," he said. "They've come back from Scheveningen. I saw them at their hotel, and they're more beautiful than ever. They were prostrate with grief at hearing I hadn't been able to get hold of a skipper; consequently they were too excited to ask your name when I gave them the cheering news that a Dutch friend had come to the rescue. They simply swallowed you whole, and clamored for the next course, so I added the—er—glad tidings of my aunt's arrival this evening, and poured the last drop of joy in their cup by saying we could start to-morrow. They're going to bring most of their things on board after tea this afternoon, about five. Oh, by the way, just as I was leaving, Miss Van Buren did call after me, 'Is your friend nice?'"

I laughed. "What did you answer?"

"I thought one more fib among so many couldn't matter, so I said you were. Heaven forgive me. By-the-by, are you really Dutch, or is that another—figure of speech?"

"I always think and speak of myself as wholly Dutch," I replied. "But my mother is English. By-the-by, I must telegraph her; and I must write my man to bring me some clothes the first thing to-morrow morning. Then you'd better send for the chauffeur you've engaged; and we'll go together to interview him on the boat before the ladies come. I think—er—it won't be best for me to meet them till to-morrow. Are you sure your chauffeur's a good man?"

"Not at all," said Starr, airily. "I merely know that he's a very young youth, who makes you feel like a grandfather at twenty-seven; who wriggles and turns pink if you speak to him suddenly, and when he wants his handkerchief to mop his perpetually moist forehead, pulls yards of cotton waste out of his pocket, by mistake. I've only his word for it—which I couldn't understand, as it was in Dutch—that he has the slightest knowledge of any motor. But he showed me written references, and seemed so proud of what they set forth, I thought they must be all right, though I couldn't read them."

"You're a queer fellow!" I exclaimed.

"Well, you see, I'm an artist—neither motorist nor botorist. By the way, what are you, beyond being van Buren's friend?"

"A Jack of several trades," said I. "I know a bit about horses, botors, motors; I fancy I'm a judge of dogs (I congratulate you on Tibe), also of chauffeurs, so come along and we'll put yours through his paces."

It now appeared that Starr had the youth on board. So I sent my two telegrams, and we started to walk to the boat. On the way Starr told me more than I had heard from Robert about his first dealings with "Lorelei," and we discussed details of the trip. The ladies have no choice, it appears, except that they will feel ill-used if allowed to miss anything. As for Starr, he confessed blissful ignorance of Holland.

"I want to go where cows wear coats, and women wear gold helmets, and dogs have revolving kennels," he said. "And I want to paint everything I see."

"Cows wear coats at Gouda. I expect you read that in Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus.' Women wear gold helmets in Friesland. Dogs have revolving kennels in Zeeland," I told him. "And if you want to paint everything you see, we shall be gone a long time."

"All the better," said Starr.

I agreed.

"It would be useful if you could plan out a trip," he went on. "It would help to account for you, you know, and make you popular."

I caught at this idea. There are a good many places that I should like to show Miss Van Buren, and visit with her. "I should have preferred her seeing my country on our wedding-trip," I said to myself. "This is the next best, though, and we can have the honeymoon in Italy." But aloud I remarked that I would map out something and submit it to my passengers in the morning.

My mother laughs, telling me that I must always go in for any new fad, whatever it may be, and that she expects some day to see several makes of airship tethered on the lawn at Liliendaal, or tied to our chimneys at The Hague in winter. There's something in her jibe, perhaps; but it would be a queer thing, indeed, if a son of the water-country didn't turn to "botoring," provided he had any soul for sport. We Hollanders made practical use of motor-boats while the people of dry lands still poked ridicule at them in comic illustrated papers; therefore this will be by no means my first experience. I had that three years ago with a racer, and again with a barge which I fitted up with a twenty horse-power motor, and used for a whole summer, after which, in a generous mood, I gave her as a wedding-gift to my chauffeur, whose bride's greatest ambition was for barge-life. Since that time I've always meant to get something good in the botoring line, but haven't made up my mind what it ought to be.

I did myself no more than justice in telling Starr that I was as desirable a man as he could find for skipper; and I shook hands with myself for every hour of botoring I had done. Thanks to past experience I can now do chauffeur's work, if necessary, as well as skipper's.

We found the "very young youth" on deck, industriously polishing brass-work, and his complexion bore out Starr's description as I questioned him about his former situations. It seems there was only one, and with a small boat; but the motor was the same as this.

The arrangement of "Lorelei's" deck aft pleases me particularly, for it might have been designed to suit my purpose. That purpose is to have as much of Miss Van Buren's society as possible during this trip. Consequently I saw with pleasure that the passengers in their deck-chairs must group round the skipper at his wheel, as there is no other comfortable place. There will be no notice up on board "Lorelei": "Please do not speak to the man at the wheel." The more he is spoken to—by the right person—the better he will like his job. What I have to pray for is dry weather, that the ladies may spend their days on deck, for just as much time as they spend below I shall consider that I am wasting. Indeed, I regret the attractiveness of the cabins, for I fear there may be a temptation to dawdle there, or lie among cushions on the comfortable seat-bunks on a gray or chilly day. "I hope she's as much interested in scenery as she apparently is in history," I said to myself as Starr and I wandered over the boat, "for the skipper-job can be combined with the business of lecturer and cicerone, if that proves a bid for popularity."

Aft of the cabins is the motor-house; and hearing our voices through the skylight, chauffeur Hendrik left the brass-work and came to stand by his engine. I immediately determined to study this engine thoroughly, so that if Hendrik's intelligence prove untrustworthy in an emergency, mine may be prepared to assist it.

He soon saw that it was useless to "show off" before me, but he enjoyed explaining the motor in broken English to Starr. The American artist heard with a vague smile the difference between the ordinary four-cycle engine of an automobile, and the two-cycle engine of this marine motor, with its piston receiving an impulse at each down stroke; tried to understand how the charge of vaporized petrol was drawn into the crank-chamber, and there slightly compressed; how the gas afterwards traveled along a by-pass into the firing chamber at the upper part of the cylinder, to be further compressed by the up-stroke of the piston and fired by the sparking plug, while the burnt gases escaped through a port uncovered by the piston in its downward strokes, admission and exhaust being thus controlled by the piston movement alone.

"Great heavens! I wronged this good youth," the patient listener cried, when he found a chance to speak. "I thought him all pinkness, and perspiration, and purple velvet slippers, but he can pull information by the yard out of his brain, as he does cotton waste out of his pocket. Unfortunately, it's waste too, as far as I'm concerned; for I don't know any more about this motor now than I did when he began. The tap of my intelligence always seems to be turned off the minute anything technical or mechanical is mentioned. Some of those things he said sounded more like the description of a lunatic asylum than anything else, and the only impression left on my mind is one of dreadful gloom."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it seems impossible that anything which has to do so much at the same time as this engine does, can remember to do half of it. It will certainly fail, and blow up with those we love on board. I never thought of that until now, and shouldn't if Hendrik hadn't explained things to me."

"We can't blow up unless the petrol gets on fire," said I, "and as the tank's away at the bow of the boat and the petrol descends to the engine by gravity and not pressure, you needn't have nightmare on that subject."

"That's another horror I hadn't realized," groaned Starr. "I took things for granted, and trusted other people to know them. A whole tank of petrol at the bow! How much will there be in it?"

"Enough to last four days."

"One of the ladies is sure to set it on fire when she's curling her hair with a spirit-lamp. Yet we can't forbid them to curl their hair on their own boat. Perhaps they'd better sleep on the barge, after all. I meant it to be for the men of the party."

"Nonsense," said I. "They're reasonable creatures. Besides, Miss Van Buren's hair curls naturally."

"How can you know?"

"Well, I do." And before my eyes arose the picture of a bright goddess of foam and spray.

"Hum! I begin to see which way the wind blows. I'm not sure she isn't the one I myself——"

"We were talking about the motor," I cut in. "The water jacketing seems thoroughly carried out; and when the party's assembled on deck, it will hear no more noise than the buzzing of a big bee, as the exhaust is led away below the water-line. It won't be bad in the cabins either, even when they keep the sliding door open, for this screen of thick sail-cloth will deaden what sound there is. And it was a smart idea to utilize the power of the magneto to light up the whole boat with those incandescent burners."

"Your mechanical information, on top of Hendrik's, is giving me a kind of acute mental dyspepsia," sighed Starr. "I hate well-informed people; they're so fond of telling you things you don't want to know. Still, I realize that you're going to be useful in a way, so I suppose I must make the best of you; and, anyhow, we shan't see much of each other, except at meals."

"Shan't we? Why, are you going to spend most of your time on board your barge, steering?"

"Not I. I've engaged a man. Didn't I tell you. A nice, handy man, not too big for his boots, or rather, his carpet slippers. He'll cook, sweep, dust, and make beds as well as keep the barge steady."

"While I'm skipper of 'Lorelei,' nobody wears carpet slippers, or purple velvet ones either, on board this boat or her tender. I suppose, if you're not going to steer, you mean to occupy yourself in your studio, painting. A wise arrangement——"

"From your point of view. But it isn't my intention. I shall—if the ladies don't object—sit mostly on 'Lorelei's' deck, making sketches, and entertaining them as well as I know how—though not with technical information."

"I shall be there to give them that, if they want it," said I.

"You? You'll have to be at the bow, skippering."

"I don't skipper at the bow, thank you. I skipper on deck aft, where I stand at the wheel and have full control of the engine through this long lever that's carried up from the engine-room."

"Hang it, I thought Hendrik, as chauffeur, would have to be there, and you'd keep a sort of outlook with a binnacle or something, for'rard. You are going to be a regular Albatross to my Ancient Mariner, aren't you?"

"Don't forget that it's by grace of the Albatross that you're a Mariner at all."

"I shall call you 'Alb,' when I feel your weight too much," said Starr, and then we two villains of the piece could not forbear a grin in each other's faces. I even found myself wondering if the Ancient One and his Bird might not form for one another a kind of attachment of habit, in the end.

It's certainly a queer association, this of ours, but as the Mariner proposed to do, we began to make the best of it; and we finished my visit to the boat on outwardly friendly terms. We even sat on deck and put our heads together over my note-book, in which I jotted down a plan of the tour. With "Lorelei," I assured him, we had but to choose our route, for as she draws only from three to three and a half feet of water, all the waterways are open to us. Did she draw more, she would be useless, even in certain rivers, in a dry season such as this is proving, and in many small canals at any season. There's only one thing which may bother us in the Frisian Meers, where we can't shove with a quant pole, or if we venture out to sea: we have no means of propulsion except the motor, and as we carry no mast, we cannot set so much as a yard of canvas. If anything should go wrong with the motor, brilliant "Lorelei" will instantly become a mere hulk at the mercy of wind and wave. However, as Starr remarked sagely, we can stop in port for wind and wave, and be very happy.

As we talked, down on a page of my note-book went a roughly sketched map of Holland, my idea being to begin with Gouda, going on to Leiden, slipping through the villages of South Holland, which seem strange to travelers, and skirting the great polder that was once the famed Haarlemmer-Meer. Then, having seen Haarlem sitting on her throne of flowers, to pass on, giving a few days to Amsterdam and interesting places in the neighborhood, watery market-towns and settlements of the merchant princes. Next in order the curious island of Marken, and the artists' haunts at Volendam. From there, to turn toward the north and the Dead Cities of the Zuider Zee, crossing afterwards to Friesland in search of beauties in golden helmets, and lingering for a while among the Frisian Meers. Later, we might work our way through Holland's most desolate and savage province, Drenthe, to the hills of Gelderland (my native country), and finish the trip with a grand climax in Zeeland, most mysterious and picturesque of all, half hidden in the sea.

I traced the proposed route for Starr, telling him that we could do such a tour in five weeks or eight, according to the inclinations of the travelers, and the length of time they cared to spend in each place. As to that, the ladies must decide, I said, and choose whether they would sleep each night on "Lorelei," or see more of Dutch life by going to hotels. But, in any case, I must plan to bring the boat each evening near enough civilization to obtain supplies.

"A good itinerary," said the Mariner, approving his Albatross, "but I warn you I shall claim half the credit. When you see me swaggering, and hear me boasting of the plans my friend Brederode and I have mapped out, contradict me if you dare. I will defy you in some things, or I shall burst of sheer spite; and we can test it now, if you like, for here they come."

It was true. They were in a cab, with luggage under the driver's feet. I had let time slip away, forgetting that I meant to escape before five, when Starr had told me they were due.

But I was determined not to meet them now. There was still time for Miss Van Buren to find some excuse and wreck the tour, if she were annoyed by my obstinate determination to know her. To-morrow there will not be time, unless she cares to make a scene; and I don't think she is a girl to make scenes.

"No. I'll leave your friends to you, for the present," said I. "We ought to start by ten to-morrow, and I'll be on hand at nine."

"I know not whether to curse or bless you," said the Mariner. But I gave him no time to do either. I was off, and out of the way before I could be noticed and recognized by the occupants of the cab. Then, back to the Club I came to write a short letter to Robert, and to jot down a few happenings for my own benefit later.

X

It was nine in the morning—a clean-washed morning of blue and gold—when I arrived on board "Lorelei," with a small box which my man brought me from Liliendaal, according to telegraphed orders.

No one was there but the chauffeur, though on board the barge "Waterspin" the "handy man" had arrived, and was settling into his new quarters. Toon de Jongh is his name, and I conceived a liking for his grave brown face, at sight. I know his type well, a type which excels in deeds, not words, and was bred in the Low Countries by certain policies of Philip Second of Spain. He liked me too, for some reason or other, I saw by his eyes, in a way one never mistakes but can never explain.

I had to find my quarters on the barge, and going below, on the first door I saw a visiting card of Mr. Ronald L. Starr's conspicuously pinned, with the one word "Alb" printed large upon it, in red ink. Chuckling, I took possession of the cabin, hauled my things out from my box, and had got them mostly packed in lockers and drawers, when I heard the sound of voices on "Lorelei."

She was there. What would she say when she discovered that the man she had "thanked enough and didn't want to see again" had foisted himself upon her party?

The evil moment couldn't be postponed for long. I might give them time to go below, and add the contents of their dressing-bags to the belongings they had bestowed in the cabins yesterday afternoon, but that would take fifteen minutes at most, and then they would be wanting to start. I should have to get on board "Lorelei," be introduced, and face the music, whether it played the "Rogue's March," or "Hail, the Conquering Hero!"

The sound of girls' laughter was so upsetting that I couldn't decide what to do with my collars and neckties. I wandered aimlessly about the cabin with my hands full, grumbling aloud, "What an ass you are!" and hadn't yet made up my mind to cross over to "Lorelei" when Starr pounded on the half-open door.

"Thank goodness, you're here!" he exclaimed, as the door fell back and revealed me.

"What has happened to make you give thanks?" I asked, disposing hurriedly of the neckties.

"Any port in a storm—even Albport. And there is a storm, an awful storm; at least "Lorelei's" staggering about as if she were half-seas over, and if you don't get us off at once every soul on board will be lost, or, what's worse, seasick. A nice beginning for the trip!"

I am so much at home on the water that I hadn't noticed the tossing and lolloping of the barge, but I realized now what was the matter. The morning was fresh, with a gusty wind blowing up the Maas, against the tide running strongly out; and consequently little "Lorelei" and sturdy "Waterspin" strained at their moorings like chained dogs who spy a bone just beyond their reach.

I didn't stop to answer, but bolted off the barge and onto the motor-boat.

Toon and Hendrik cast off the moorings, the chauffeur flew below to set his engine going; I took the wheel, pushed over the starting lever, the little propeller began to turn, and we were away on the first of the watery miles which stretch before us, for joy or sorrow.

Starr had followed Hendrik below, and just as the motor was getting well to work, revolving under my feet at the rate of six hundred revolutions a minute, I heard his voice shouting——

"Hullo, hullo! catch the dog!—you up there."

At the same instant arose a babel of cries, "Oh, my angel! Don't let him drown! Save him!" and the Emperor Tiberius shot up the companion as if launched from a catapult. Unused to engines and a life on the wave, frightened by the teuf-teuf of the motor, his next bound would have carried him overboard into the river; but hanging on to the wheel with one hand, with the other I seized the dog by the collar—a new, resplendent collar—just as somebody else, rushing to the rescue from below, caught him by the tail.

It was Miss Van Buren.

For a second—I bending down, she stretching up—our faces were neighbors, and I had time to see her expression undergo several lightning changes—surprise, incredulity, and a few others not as easy to read—before she retired, leaving Tibe to me. Instead of coming up on deck as she had evidently intended to do, she vanished, and a head exquisitely hatted and blue-veiled appeared in place of hers.

A moment later the tiny lady of the arbor, transformed into Parisian elegance by an effective white yachting costume, with a coquettish blue yachting-cap on her gray hair, the goggling effect of the glasses softened by the floating folds of azure chiffon, arrived to succor her beloved. She started slightly, staring at me through veil and spectacles, and I deduced that whatever Starr had told his "aunt" about the skipper, it had not prepared her to meet the man of the arbor. Those hidden eyes recognized me, and took in the situation.

Under their fire I realized that the success of my adventure might largely depend upon the chaperon; and if, suspecting something more than met her gaze, she should strike an attitude of disapproval, she could prejudice the girls against the skipper, and so manoeuver that he had his trouble for his pains.

With this danger ahead, I redoubled my attentions to Tiberius; but it was fortunate for me that the doubts he entertained of the man in the arbor were chased away by gratitude for the man on the boat. If it had not been so, such is the primitive sincerity of dog kind—especially bulldog kind—no bribe in my power to offer could have induced him to dissimulate. I knew this, and trembled; but Tibe, being an animal of parts, was not long in comprehending that the hand on his collar meant well by him. He deigned to fawn, and meeting his glance at close quarters, I read his dog-soul through the brook-brown depths of the clear eyes. After that moment, in which we came to a full understanding one of the other, once and for all, I knew that Tibe's wrinkled mask, his terrible mouth, and the ferocious tusks standing up like two stalagmites in the black, protruding under jaw, disguised a nature almost too amiable and confiding for a world of hypocrites. Tragic fate, to seem in the shallow eyes of strangers a monster of evil from whom to flee, while your warm heart, bursting with love and kindness, sends you chasing those who avoid you, eager to demonstrate affection! Such a fate is destined to be Tibe's, so long as he may live; but in this first instant of our real acquaintance he felt that I at least saw through his disguise; and under the nose and spectacles of his mistress he sealed our friendship with a wet kiss on my sleeve.

"Good boy!" said I, and meant it. He had given me a character, and had placed me upon a sound footing with one who would be, I foresaw, a Power on "Lorelei."

"Thank you so much!" said she, with the promised burr-r so pronounced in her accent that she must, I thought, have spent the night in practising it. She then carefully selected the best chair, and took from another a blue silk cushion which matched her yachting-cap and veil.

As she sat down, making a footstool of Tibe, and displaying two exquisitely shod feet in brand new suède shoes, Miss Rivers appeared, pale and interesting.

"I do hope you're better, my poor child," purred the Chaperon.

"Oh, thank you, dear Lady MacNairne, I shall be quite right now we've started."

This interchange of civilities told that the Mariner's "Aunt Fay" had already contrived to ingratiate herself with her charges.

Miss Rivers sank into the nearest chair, closing her eyes, while I stood aloof and turned the wheel; but presently the languid lashes lifted, and she became conscious of me. Then her eyes grew big. She remembered me from the day at the Prinzenhof, or the Horse Show, perhaps. Evidently Starr had not named me yet, nor had Miss Van Buren, in descending after our brief encounter, put any questions. Whether this boded ill or well, I could not decide, but longed to get suspense over; and I was not kept waiting.

I heard Starr's voice below urging Miss Van Buren on deck. "Don't bother about putting everything away," he said. "Do it later. You must say good-by to Rotterdam. Who knows what will have happened to us before we get back?"

It would not be my fault if two of the party were not engaged, I was thinking hopefully, as Miss Van Buren's eyes—rising from below like stars above a dark horizon—met mine. There was no recognition in them. To all appearance oblivious of ever having seen my insignificant features on land or sea, she came smiling up, on the friendliest terms with Starr.

The vacant chair, most conveniently placed for her, was close to the wheel, and I hoped that she would take it. But rather than be thus trapped, she stepped over Tibe and pushed past her stepsister with an "I beg your pardon, dear."

The Mariner gave no glance at me, but there was a catch in his voice which betokened a twinkle of the eye, as he said——

"Aunt Fay, Miss Van Buren and Miss Rivers, I must introduce the friend I told you about: our skipper, Jonkheer Brederode."

Miss Rivers smiled delightfully, with just such a flush of ingenuous surprise as I should have liked to see on another face.

"Why, how curious," she exclaimed, "that you should be a friend of Mr. Starr's! I think we have almost met Jonkheer Brederode before, haven't we, Nell?"

"Have we?" sweetly inquired Miss Van Buren. "I'm a little near-sighted, and I've such a wretched memory for faces. Unless I notice people particularly, I have to be introduced at least twice before it occurs to me to bow."

"Oh, but, Nell," protested Miss Rivers. "Surely you know we saw Mr.—no, Jonkheer Brederode—with your cousin at the Museum in Delft, and then afterwards you——"

"People's clothes make so much difference," remarked Miss Van Buren.

"Oh, but I wasn't thinking of your sea adventure, so much as when Jonkheer Brederode rode in the contest——"

"I'm afraid I was looking at the horses," cut in her stepsister.

If Robert had been on board at this juncture he would probably have wished to box his cousin's ears, but I had no such desire, though mine were tingling. In fact, I should have enjoyed boxing Robert's; for I saw that, with the best intentions in the world (and intentions are dangerous weapons!), my too-loyal friend had in some way contrived to make me appear insufferable. Perhaps he'd given the impression that I had boasted an intention to meet her within a given time, and she took this for my brutal way of carrying out the boast.

"What is a Jonkheer?" the pseudo Lady MacNairne demanded of Starr.

"I don't know exactly," he admitted.

"Don't you? But, nephew dear, how can you help knowing, when you have an old friend who is one?"

(Was there a spice of malice in this question?)

"You see, almost ever since I've known him, I've thought of him as Alb," Starr explained hastily. "Alb is a kind of—er—pet name."

"I suppose it means something nice in Dutch," said Miss Rivers, in the soft, pretty way she has, which would fain make every one around her happy. "But I think Mr. van Buren told us that 'Jonkheer' was like our baronet; Jonkheer instead of 'Sir,' isn't it?"

"Something of the sort," I answered.

"It sticks in the throat, if you'll excuse me for saying so, like a bit of crust," remarked Aunt Fay.

"You can all call him Alb," said Starr.

"Why not compromise with Skipper?" asked Miss Van Buren, looking at my yachting-cap (rather a nice one) with serene impertinence. "We shall probably never have the pleasure of knowing him on land, so why stumble over Dutch names or titles? He has come on board 'Lorelei' to be our skipper, hasn't he? So he would probably prefer to be called 'Skipper.'"

Starr leaned down to pat Tibe, shaking all over. "Ha, ha, ha!" he gasped. "I never saw such a funny tail; I do hope it isn't going to give me hysterics."

But nobody else laughed, and Miss Rivers was gazing at her stepsister in a shocked, questioning way, her violet eyes saying as plainly as if they spoke——

"My darling girl, what possesses you to be so rude to an inoffensive foreigner?"

I should have liked to ask the same question, in the same words; but I said nothing, did nothing except turn the wheel with the air of that Miller who grinds slowly but exceedingly small, and smile a hard, confident smile which warned the enemy——

"Oh yes, you are going to know me on land, and love me on land, so you might as well make up your mind to what has to come."

She caught the look, which forcibly dragged hers down from my hat-brim, and I am convinced that she read its meaning. It made her hate me a degree worse, of course; but what is an extra stone rolled behind the doors of the resisting citadel, or a gallon more or less of boiling oil to dash on the heads of the besiegers? If they are determined, it comes to the same thing in the end.

Fortunately for the spirits of the other players who were "on" in this scene (in a subordinate capacity), the fair Enemy was not of the nature to sulk. True, of free will she did not address me; but having shown her opinion of and intentions toward the person deserving punishment, she did not weary her arm with continued castigation. Instead, she gave herself up heart and soul to delight in her first taste of "botoring." She basked in it, she reveled in it; had she been a kitten, I think she would have purred in sheer physical enjoyment of it.

"My boat! My boat!" she repeated, lingering over the words as if they had been cream and sugar. "Oh, I wonder if it knows it's My Boat? I wish it could. I should like it to get fond of me. I know it's alive. Feel its heart beat. What Tibe is to Lady MacNairne, 'Lorelei' is going to be to me. We never lived before, did we, Phil? And aren't you glad we came? Who knows what will become of us after this, for we certainly never can go home again and take up life where we left it off."