that is why the world will
not forget him in a hurry."

This and several other receipts, quae nunc perscribere longum est,
Margaret gave him with sparkling eyes, and Gerard received them like
a legacy from Heaven, so interesting are some things that read
uninteresting. Thus provided with money and knowledge, Gerard decided to
marry and fly with his wife to Italy. Nothing remained now but to inform
Margaret Brandt of his resolution, and to publish the banns as quietly
as possible. He went to Sevenbergen earlier than usual on both these
errands. He began with Margaret; told her of the Dame Van Eyck's
goodness, and the resolution he had come to at last, and invited her
co-operation.

She refused it plump.

"No, Gerard; you and I have never spoken of your family, but when you
come to marriage--" She stopped, then began again. "I do think your
father has no ill-will to me more than to another. He told Peter
Buyskens as much, and Peter told me. But so long as he is bent on your
being a priest (you ought have told me this instead of I you), I could
not marry you, Gerard, dearly as I love you."

Gerard strove in vain to shake this resolution. He found it very easy
to make her cry, but impossible to make her yield. Then Gerard was
impatient and unjust.

"Very well!" he cried; "then you are on their side, and you will drive
me to be a priest, for this must end one way or another. My parents hate
me in earnest, but my lover only loves me in jest."

And with this wild, bitter speech, he flung away home again, and left
Margaret weeping.

When a man misbehaves, the effect is curious on a girl who loves him
sincerely. It makes her pity him. This, to some of us males, seems
anything but logical. The fault is in our own eye; the logic is too
swift for us. The girl argues thus:--"How unhappy, how vexed, how poor
he must be to misbehave! Poor thing!"

Margaret was full of this sweet womanly pity, when, to her great
surprise, scarce an hour and a half after he left her, Gerard came
running back to her with the fragments of a picture in his hand, and
panting with anger and grief.

"There, Margaret! see! see! the wretches! Look at their spite! They have
cut your portrait to pieces."

Margaret looked, and, sure enough, some malicious hand had cut her
portrait into five pieces. She was a good girl, but she was not ice; she
turned red to her very forehead.

"Who did it?"

"Nay, I know not. I dared not ask; for I should hate the