unsought after. Servants in the Netherlands, I hear, are not so good
but that they might be better; and most people knew what a treasure
Professor van Dijck had in his Koosje. However, as the professor
conscientiously raised her wages from time to time, Koosje never thought
of leaving him.

But there is one bribe no woman can resist--the bribe that is offered
by love. As Professor van Dijck had expected and feared, that bribe ere
long was held out to Koosje, and Koosje was too weak to resist it. Not
that he wished her to do so. If the girl had a chance of settling well
and happily for life, he would be the last to dream of throwing any
obstacle in her way. He had come to be an old man himself; he lived all
alone, save for his servants, in a great, rambling house, whose huge
apartments were all set out with horrible anatomical preparations and
grisly skeletons; and, though the stately passages were paved with white
marble, and led into rooms which would easily have accommodated crowds
of guests, he went into no society save that of savants as old and
fossil-like as himself; in other words, he was an old bachelor who lived
entirely for his profession and the study of the great masters by the
interpretation of a genuine old Stradivari. Yet the old professor had a
memory; he recalled the time when he had been young who now was old--the
time when his heart was a good deal more tender, his blood a great deal
warmer, and his fancy very much more easily stirred than nowadays. There
was a dead-and-gone romance which had broken his heart, sentimentally
speaking--a romance long since crumbled into dust, which had sent him
for comfort into the study of osteology and the music of the Stradivari;
yet the memory thereof made him considerably more lenient to Koosje's
weakness than Koosje herself had ever expected to find him.

Not that she had intended to tell him at first; she was only three and