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Still, it is hard to control one's thoughts; and I wondered more and more as Jonkheer Brederode hurried Nell and me back to the hotel, not by the short way we had taken before, but dodging about through a dozen intricate streets as if he were anxious to give trouble to any one who might be following.

Jonkheer Brederode was pleased, I think, to feel that some one took an interest in him; but he made light of the danger, and saw us off so merrily that I forgot to worry. Mr. van Buren didn't want to drive; Mr. Starr doesn't know how; and as Nell said she would like to sit in front with the chauffeur, Lady MacNairne and I had the two men in the tonneau with us.

She said she had it on very good authority that it was entirely a mistake about Jonkheer Brederode being in love with Nell. Perhaps he had wished to blind people by making them think so, but it was really for my sake he had suggested to his friend, Mr. Starr, that he should be skipper of "Lorelei."

I was on the point of asking him what had become of Sir Alexander MacNairne, with whom we had left him violently shaking hands, when I remembered that Lady MacNairne had said he was a "relation of hers by marriage," so I thought, since there was evidently trouble of some sort between him and Jonkheer Brederode, I had better not bring up the subject in her presence.

The Mariner gave no glance at me, but there was a catch in his voice which betokened a twinkle of the eye, as he said "Aunt Fay, Miss Van Buren and Miss Rivers, I must introduce the friend I told you about: our skipper, Jonkheer Brederode." Miss Rivers smiled delightfully, with just such a flush of ingenuous surprise as I should have liked to see on another face.

"Fiends!" gasped the Chaperon, gazing shoreward in a kind of evil fascination. "And we called them angels and cherubs! I think you are good, Jonkheer, not to say, 'I told you so."

"You wouldn't think so if you were in their midst in a motor-boat," said the Jonkheer. "I'm ready to try," Nell answered. "But I'm not ready to let you," he said, with one of his nice smiles. However, this didn't conciliate Nell. In an instant she bristled up, as she used to with him, before Amsterdam. "It's my boat," she said. "But I'm the boat's skipper.

Nell smiled in a naughty, mischievous way, when her cousin remarked that his mother's family came originally from Friesland, I suppose because Jonkheer Brederode had just told us that the Frisian people are the most obstinate and persistent in the Netherlands: that all the obstinacy in any other whole province would not be as much as is contained in one Frisian man or woman.

There were other sights; but Jonkheer Brederode said these were the only ones for ladies, and hurried us by some of the booths with painted pictures of three-headed people or girls cut off at the waist, which Nell wished particularly to see.

We didn't meet one who had not been loyal to the helmet of her youth; and they were such beautiful old creatures that I could well believe the legend Jonkheer Brederode told us: how the sirens of the North Sea had wedded Frisian men, and all the girl-children had been as magically lovely as their mothers.