d Rex and Paddy? And do they still dig
for moles in the flower-beds? Or did the dose of red pepper my father
scattered over the beds cure them of digging?"

"I wonder," observed Willem, "why everybody always talks about
everything else when I want to talk about Anne Marie. And if other
fellows' mothers come to see them and live with them, why doesn't Anne
Marie come and live with me? I asked Oom Peter once and he said----"

"I've got to leave you now and hurry over to Mynheer Grimm's office with
my report," broke in Hartmann. "My train was a little late anyhow and
you know how he hates to be kept waiting."

They had entered a wide gateway and had come from suburban America, at a
step, into rural Holland. The prim gravelled drive led between acres of
prosaically regular flower-beds, flanked on one side by a domed green
house and on the other by a creaking Dutch windmill with weather-browned
sails.

Straight ahead and absurdly near the road for a country house that
boasted so much land about it, was the stone and yellow stucco cottage
that for centuries had sheltered successive generations of Grimms.
Painfully neat, unpicturesquely ugly, the house stood among its great
oaks. It did not nestle among them. It stood. As well expect a breadth
of starched brown holland to nestle. To deprive the abode of any
lingering taint of picturesqueness, a blue and white signboard, thirty
feet long, stretching between it and the main street, flashed to all the
passing world the news that this was the headquarters of the celebrated
"Grimm's Botanical Gardens and Nurseries."

The interior of the house was as delightful as its outside was hideous.
Here, neatness raised to the nth power chanced to strike the keynote of
a certain beauty. The big living-room, with its stairway leading to the
bedroom gallery above, was a repository of curios that would have set an
antiquary mad. From the ancient clock to the priceless old blue china,
three-fourths of the room's appointments might have served to deck a
Holland museum. The remaining fourth contained such articles as a
glaringly modern telephone on a nondescript desk, and a compromise
between old and new in the shape of a square piano in the bay window, an
ancient table. And several patently twentieth century articles helped
still further to rob the place of any harmony or unison in effect.

An altogether charming Dutch maiden was dusting, and occasionally
stopping to restore some slightly di