, her face being hidden in her
hands. I misunderstood their purport, and consequently did not at once
know what to reply.

"It was she who solved my perplexity.

"She suddenly left off sobbing, and looked me full in the face with a
singularly resolute expression.

"I could therefore contemplate her at my leisure, and found that if
possible she was more beautiful than ever, her features still more
delicate and refined, the tears on her fair cheeks--altogether she was
the most enchanting and touching spectacle that a man could behold.

"'You think a good deal of what you have done,' she said in her
quietest tones. 'However if it is not in this hour it will be in some
other; carried out my purpose will surely be, for I am sick of life. If
you knew all you would certainly not blame me, but in the main you do
know; you have been yourself at the exhibition, you have there seen how
a wicked and cruel-hearted man has dared to behave to a poor, virtuous,
unhappy girl who would have nothing to say to him.'

"'What!' I cried, and the solution of the mystery flashed across me;
'he has then--you have not sat to him once for it?'

"'I!' she cried, with all the offended dignity of a little queen. 'I do
not so much as know what it looks like. I have only been told of it by
my landlady, who has not herself seen it, but an officer, to whom she
carried back a uniform yesterday evening, said to her: "Your lodger,
the pretty girl, who is so vastly coy whenever one comes to propose
anything to her, and always locks herself up, does not seem to be so
inaccessible to civilians; there she is at the exhibition, painted just
as God made her; to be sure Dutch ducats are more valuable than our
uniform buttons." At this the tailor's wife asked further questions,
and told me again all that she learnt. She herself is quite furious,
and never would have believed it of Herr van Kuylen. And all because I
had refused to go again to his studio after he had come the third day
of Whitsuntide to pay me a visit, when he knew I should be alone with
the children, and made me an offer of marriage in French that Babette
might not understand him; for which very reason I answered in German
that I did not mean to marry, and that he knew very well why, and that
now after his declaration I could no longer sit to him as he must
perfectly understand. But he seemed to understand nothing, he was like
a maniac, and I had great difficulty to get him out of the room at