very
liable of losing their way. I wonder if Mynheer Peter will send me
'here, there, and everywhere on business' when I'm older."

"Perhaps," agreed Hartmann, catching the slight note of wistfulness in
Willem's voice. "You're beginning the way I began. It wasn't more than a
week after my father got his gardening job with Mr. Grimm that I used to
be sent up to meet the trains with a basket of flowers and 'the
compliments of Peter Grimm.' It seems more like yesterday than eighteen
years ago."

"I'm glad you're back from New York City," said the boy, circling back
to the conversation's starting-point. "It's been rather lonely. Mynheer
Peter has been so busy. And Frederik----"

"Well," queried Jim as the boy checked himself and looked nervously
behind him, "what about Frederik? And why do you always look like that
when you speak of him?"

"Like what?"

"As if you were afraid some one would slap you. Is Frederik ever unkind
to you?"

"No," denied the boy, in scared haste. "No, he never is. He--he doesn't
notice me at all. That's what I was going to say. He doesn't seem to
care to. But he likes to be with Kathrien, I think. Yes, I'm sure he
does. I think Kathrien missed you, too, Mr. Hartmann."

The big man grew of a sudden vaguely embarrassed. He cast back along the
trail of the talk for some divergent path, and found one.

"Yes," he said, "it's good to be back from New York. The city always
seems to cramp me and make it hard for me to breathe. The pavements hurt
my feet and I have a silly feeling as though the skyscrapers were going
to topple inward."

He was talking to himself rather than to the boy. But Willem rejoined
sympathetically:

"I don't like New York City either."

"You, why you surely can't remember when you used to live there?"

The boy's fair brow creased in an effort of memory.

"Sometimes," he hesitated, "I can. And sometimes I don't seem able to.
But I remember Anne Marie. She cried."

"How is Mynheer Peter?" demanded Hartmann with galvanic suddenness. "And
how are that last lot of Madonna lilies coming on? They ought to be----"

"Sometimes," went on the boy, still following his own line of thought
and oblivious of the interruption, "sometimes I wonder why she cried.
Sometimes for a minute or two--mostly at night, when I'm nearly
asleep--I seem to remember why. But I always forget. Mr. Hartmann, did
you see Anne Marie when you were in New York City?"

"No, of course not. How are Lad an