“Very well dressed indeed, professor,” returned Koosje, promptly.

“And what are you doing in Utrecht—­in such a plight as this, too?” he asked, still keeping at a safe distance.

“O mynheer, I am all alone in the world,” she answered, her blue misty eyes filled with tears.  “I had a month ago a dear, good, kind father, but he has died, and I am indeed desolate.  I always believed him rich, and to these things,” 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 picked up from the yachtsmen frequenting her native town.  The professor found she had been but a distant relative of the Mevrouw Baake, to seek whom she had come to Utrecht, and that she had no kinsfolk upon whom she could depend—­a fact which accounted for the profusion of her jewellery, all her golden trinkets having descended to her as heirlooms.