hailing and thundering and lightning
soon."

"Oh, do you think she'll try to get Robert back again?" gasped Phyllis.

"Unless another and riper fruit drops into her mouth."

"As if it would! You frighten me. Robert did beg last night that I'd
marry him almost at once, and not go back to England--unless--on our
honeymoon. I told him I wouldn't think of such a thing.
But--perhaps--oh, we _couldn't_ lose each other now. I do believe we
were made for one another."

"I begin to believe so, too," said I.

And as that belief increased, so decreased the pain of my loss. Phyllis
still is, and ever will be, a Burne-Jones Angel; and when, with her
sleeves rolled up, she makes cake in the six-foot-by-six kitchen of
"Waterspin," among the blue china and brasses, she is enough to melt the
heart of Diogenes. Nevertheless, I cannot break mine at losing a girl
who was born for a Robert van Buren. After all, Nell is more
bewilderingly beautiful, and has twice Phyllis's magnetism. She has too
fine a sense of humor to fall in love with a man's inches and muscles.
That one speech of Phyllis's taught me resignation, and showed me in a
flash that, despite her charms, she is somewhat early Victorian.

I glanced toward Nell, on whose brilliant face indifference to her
good-looking cousin was expressed, as she stood talking to him--probably
about himself--and wondered how, for a little while, my worship could
have strayed from her to Phyllis. A girl born for Robert van Buren!--A
sense of calm, beatific brotherliness stole through my veins. Nell had
never been so lovely or so lovable, and I resolved to find out from my
sister if she still thought there might be hope for me in that
direction.

"I shouldn't keep Robert waiting," I went on, without a pang. "There's
no telling what Freule Menela mightn't do. She's clever--as well as
spiteful."

"And poor Robert is so honorable," sighed Phyllis. "If he'd known that
you were working to--to free him, he might have felt it was a plot, and
have refused to accept his release. You don't think I ought to tell him,
do you?"

"Certainly not," said I. "That's our secret."

"How good you are! Well, I'll take your advice. Yet it does seem so
strange--to be married, and live in Holland, when I never thought that
anything could be really nice out of England. But Robert seems to me
exactly like an Englishman: that's why I love him so dreadfully."

"And I suppose you seem to him exactly like a Dutch gir