," with a gesture that included her dress and the
ornaments on the table, "I have ever been accustomed. Thus I ordered
without consideration such clothes as I thought needful. And then I
found there was nothing for me--not a hundred guilders to call my own
when all was paid."

"But what brought you to Utrecht?"

"He sent me here, mynheer. In his last illness, only of three days'
duration, he bade me gather all together and come to this city, where I
was to ask for a Mevrouw Baake, his cousin."

"Mevrouw Baake, of the Sigaren Fabrijk," said Dortje, in an aside, to
the others. "I lived servant with her before I came here."

"I had heard very little about her, only my father had sometimes
mentioned his cousin to me; they had once been betrothed," the stranger
continued. "But when I reached Utrecht I found she was dead--two years
dead; but we had never heard of it."

"Dear, dear, dear!" exclaimed the professor, pityingly. "Well, you had
better let Koosje put you to bed, and we will see what can be done for
you in the morning."

"Am I to make up a bed?" Koosje asked, following him along the passage.

The professor wheeled round and faced her.

"She had better sleep in the guest room," he said, thoughtfully,
regardless of the cold which struck to his slippered feet from the
marble floor. "That is the only room which does not contain specimens
that would probably frighten the poor child. I am very much afraid,
Koosje," he concluded, doubtfully, "that she is a lady; and what we are
to do with a lady I can't think."

With that the old gentleman shuffled off to his cosey room, and Koosje
turned back to her kitchen.

"He'll never think of marrying her," mused Koosje, rather blankly. If
she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have
received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology
and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday
world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised
wisdom to the ignorance of a child of sixteen or seventeen.

However, on the morrow matters assumed a somewhat different aspect.
Gertrude van Floote proved to be not exactly a gentlewoman. It is true
that her father had been a well-to-do man for his station in life, and
had very much spoiled and indulged his one motherless child. Yet her
education was so slight that she could do little more than read and
write, besides speaking a little English, which she had pick