storm rolled up to darken the
landscape, and send Phyllis for protection to her "brother's" side. I
should certainly have asked her, there and then, to forget the Viking,
if a tree near by had not been struck by lightning at that instant, and
Nell, in her sudden pallor and stricken silence, had not been more
beautiful than I had seen her yet.

I did not remember until we had been settled for a night and part of a
day at a hotel with a view and a garden, that Alb was more at home in
Gelderland than elsewhere in Holland. But he was treated with marked
respect at the Bellevue, and people took off their hats to him in the
street with irritating deference. We went about a good deal in the town,
seeing historic inns and other show things (the best of which was a room
once occupied by Philip the Second's Duke of Alva), therefore I had many
opportunities of increasing my respect for Alb as a personage of
importance, if I had been inclined to profit by them; and on top of this
arrived his automobile from some unknown lair. There were some famous
drives to be taken in the neighborhood of Arnhem, he explained in that
quiet way of his, and he had thought it would be pleasant to take them
in his car.

We started out in it on the second morning, and hardly had we left the
big pleasure-town with its parks and villas, when we plunged into
forests as deep, as majestic, as those round Haarlem and The Hague;
forests tunneled with long green avenues of silver-trunked beeches,
where the light was the green light which mermaids know. Here and there
rose the fine gateways and distant towers of some great estate, and
Brederode told us that Gelderland was famous for its old families and
houses, as well as for the only hills in Holland.

"Fifty or sixty years ago," said he, "the nobility of Gelderland was so
proud that no one who wasn't noble was allowed to buy an estate and
settle here."

"Allowed!" exclaimed Nell. "How could they be prevented if they had
money and an estate was for sale?"

Brederode smiled. "There were ways," he answered. "Once a rich banker of
Amsterdam thought he would like to retire and have a fine house in
aristocratic Gelderland. He bought a place, and wished to build a house
to please his fancy; but no architect would make his plans, nobody would
sell him bricks or building material of any kind, and he could get no
workmen. Every one stood in too great awe of the powerful nobles. So you
see, boycotting isn't confin