arr, hastily. It was not the
first time he had cut her short, and the little masquerader bristled
under the treatment.

"Oh yes; that was when you were painting my portrait, wasn't it?"

Starr flushed, and I guessed why, remembering his Salon success, and
recalling that it was his portrait of Lady MacNairne which had been
exhibited this year. Of course, I had been stupid not to put the two
facts together, and realize that his success and her portrait, must have
been one and the same.

The girls had probably heard of it, and must be asking themselves at
this moment how a portrait of this little spectacled thing could have
been possible. Cruel Aunt Fay! Somehow, she must have known that the
face of her _alter ego_ had been painted and exhibited by Starr, and she
was enjoying his misery, as bad boys enjoy the wrigglings of butterflies
on pins.

In pity I stepped in to the rescue, and began again, before a question
about the portrait could fall from the lips of Miss Rivers, on which I
saw it trembling.

"It's the Rhine for no particular reason," I said. "It's quite
arbitrary. Farther on it's the Oude Rhine, farther still the Krommer, or
Crooked Rhine. But if you think little of it here, you'll despise it at
Katwyk, where its end is so ignominious that it has to be pumped into
the sea."

"I don't think that ignominious," said the Chaperon. "I suppose it
doesn't choose to go into the sea. It would rather rest after its labors
and lie down in a pleasant pool, to dream about where it rose on the
Splugen, or about the way it poured out of Lake Constance, and went
roaring over the rocks at Schaffhausen to wind on among hilly vineyards
and ruined castles, past the Drachenfels and Cologne. If they choose to
pump it against its will, that's _their_ affair; at least that's how _I_
should feel if I were the Rhine."

"How Scotch of you, Aunt Fay!" exclaimed Starr, fervently; but he looked
worried; and I wondered if he had told the girls that Lady MacNairne had
never been much abroad. Evidently her double has traveled, and
remembered what she saw. I am not curious concerning other people's
affairs, but I confess I should like to know something of Aunt Fay's
past, for she seems so ignorant of some things, so well-informed upon
others.

Suddenly Miss Van Buren looked up from a red book which had engaged her
attention ever since, at Alphen, we turned out of the narrow
water-street of the canal into the broader thoroughfare of th