washing up the cups and saucers, or at
least _the_ cup and saucer, and other articles the professor had used
for his tea; and after a few minutes' silence he spoke again.

"What are you going to do? Punish her, or turn her out, or what?"

"I shall let him--_marry_ her," replied Koosje, with a portentous nod.

The old gentleman couldn't help laughing. "You think he will pay off
your old scores?"

"Before long," answered Koosje, grimly, "she will find him out--as I
have done."

Then, having finished washing the tea-things, which the professor had
shuddered to behold in her angry hands, she whirled herself out of the
room and left him alone.

"Oh, these women--these women!" he cried, in confidence, to the pictures
and skeletons. "What a worry they are! An old bachelor has the best of
it in the main, I do believe. But oh, Jan van der Welde, what a donkey
you must be to get yourself mixed up in such a broil! and yet--ah!"

The fossilised old gentleman broke off with a sigh as he recalled the
memory of a certain dead-and-gone romance which had happened--goodness
only knows how many years before--when he, like Jan van der Welde, would
have thrown the world away for a glance of a certain pair of blue eyes,
at the bidding of a certain English tongue, whose broken _Nederlandsche
taal_ was to him the sweetest music ever heard on earth--sweeter even
than the strains of the Stradivari when from under his skilful fingers
rose the perfect melodies of old masters. Ay, but the sweet eyes had
been closed in death many a long, long, year, the sweet voice hushed
in silence. He had watched the dear life ebb away, the fire in the
blue eyes fade out. He had felt each day that the clasp of the little
greeting fingers was less close; each day he had seen the outline of the
face grow sharper; and at last there had come one when the poor little
English-woman met him with the gaze of one who knew him not, and
babbled, not of green fields, but of horses and dogs, and of a brother
Jack, who, five years before, had gone down with her Majesty's ship
_Alligator_ in mid-Atlantic.

Ay, but that was many and many a year agone. His young, blue-eyed love
stood out alone in life's history, a thing apart. Of the gentler sex, in
a general way, the old professor had not seen that which had raised it
in his estimation to the level of the one woman over whose memory hung a
bright halo of romance.

Fifteen years had passed away; the old professor of o