nickname among his
friends is William the Silent."

"Why?" I asked, pretending unconsciousness.

"Don't you think there is a likeness?"

"I'm bad at seeing likenesses," said I.

"Why, Nell, I don't think you are," Phil defended me against myself.
"You're always seeing the strangest resemblances between clouds and
animals, and plants and people, and there's no end to what you find on
wall papers. This very day you thought Mr. Starr like Robert Louis
Stevenson, though I----"

"That's when my imagination's running loose," I explained. "Cousin
Robert is talking about facts."

"Oh!" said Phil.

"It's rather an ugly portrait," I went on; "I don't suppose William of
Orange was like it one bit."

"But we have two reasons for calling Brederode the Taciturn," said
Robert. "He has a way to keep still about things which other people
discuss. Sometimes it makes men angry, but especially the ladies.
Brederode does not care what others think; he descends from the great
Brederode, but he is different."

"The Water Beggar was brave," I remarked.

"Rudolph is brave," retorted Cousin Robert, firing up. "You will think
so to-morrow."

"What is he going to do?" I asked. "Something to startle Holland?"

"Holland has seen him do it before, but you have not. You will see him
ride better than any one else in the jumping contests at the _Concours
Hippique_ at Scheveningen. It will be a fine show, but Brederode and his
horses will be the best. My mother has a box. She will take you."

"But I thought you were going to take us to The Hague and the Huis ten
Bosch?"

"That will be in the early morning. Perhaps my sisters will go; and
after we have finished the pictures at The Hague, we will meet my mother
and my fiancee, Freule Menela van der Windt, at the race grounds about
two, and the show will not be over till seven, so dinner will be late."

"You Dutch are a strong race," I murmured.

"Brederode says he always comes here when he's anywhere in the
neighborhood, for a look at the Prinzenhof on the tenth of July," Robert
went on. "Odd, is it not?"

"No more odd than that we should have been here," said I. But I said
this in a low voice; and it's only a man who is in love with a girl who
hears her when she mutters.

"He asked how the automobile was going, and I mentioned one or two
things that bothered me, so he has gone out to talk to the chauffeur,"
Cousin Robert continued, unable to turn his thoughts from his Admirable
C