painting once acquired, both fame
and fortune are sure to follow.

Christine de Ruyter had taken lessons of the best masters in Holland,
Italy, and France. Few, if any women artists of her age, equalled or
excelled her. Her conversations on art in the Netherlands charmed her
two artist friends. She said, "The works of art of the fifteenth and
seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands seemed to grow out of the very
soil of the low countries. Our old artists revelled in the varied
costumes and manifold types that thronged the cities of the Hanseatic
League. The artist's imagination was fascinated by the wealth of color he
saw on sturdy laborers, on weather-beaten mariners, burly citizens, and
sagacious traders.

"Rubens delighted often in a concentrated light, and was master of
artistic material along the whole range. He painted well portraits,
landscapes, battles of heroes, gallant love-making of the noble, and the
coarse pleasures of the vulgar. Nearly a thousand pictures bear the name
of Rubens.

"The artistic labor of Frans Hals of Haarlem extended over half a
century. He possessed the utmost vivacity of conception, purity of color,
and breadth of execution, as shown in his latest works, and so well did
he handle his brush that drawing seems almost lost in a maze of color
tone. The throng of genre painters, who have secured for Dutch art its
greatest triumph, are well nigh innumerable."

Christine was very fond of flower-pieces, and had painted lovely
marguerites on Gertrude's white dress, in Alfonso's full length picture
of his sister, which he was soon to carry to Paris as his wedding
present.

Leo and Alfonso much wished to extend their journey north to Copenhagen
and Stockholm, the "Venice of the North," but letters urging a speedy
return to the marriage of George and Gertrude in Paris, forced the two
artists to shorten their journey, say good-bye to their kind friends of
Amsterdam, and hasten back to Paris, taking portraits of their own skill
as wedding gifts.

CHAPTER XIX

PARIS AND THE WEDDING

Friday morning, Alfonso and Leo were missed at the table, and during the
day as guides. Early every day while in Paris, Alfonso had bouquets of
fresh flowers sent to the rooms of his mother, sisters, and May Ingram.
After his departure the flowers did not come, so Gertrude and May before
breakfast walked down the boulevard to the flower show, near the
Madeleine, where twice a week are gathered many flow