He stood watching the narrow space in which she had vanished, and thinking how gentle she was, and how she had contrived somehow to make him feel that now it was she who had been consoling him, and trying to interest him and amuse him.  He had not realized that before; he had been used to interesting and amusing her, but he could not resent it; he could not resent the implication of superiority, if such a thing were possible, which her kindness conveyed.  The question with Breckon was whether she had walked with him so long because she wished, in the hour, to make up as fully as possible for the day’s neglect, or because she had liked to walk up and down with him.  It was a question he found keeping itself poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got into his berth under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to one solution and now to the other, with a delicate oscillation that was charming.

The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry.  It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape.  Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum.  Lottie, with respect to the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland, she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage.  The agriculture which triumphed everywhere on the little half—­acre plots lifted fifteen inches above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and white cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow, were what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to the question of fighting over a country like that.  It was a concession to his wife’s impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in a landscape which had evidently not changed since.  She said it was hard to realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very patient with Breckon’s defence of the monarchy on the ground that the young Queen was a very pretty girl.

“And she is only sixteen,” Boyne urged.

“Then she is two years too old for you,” said Lottie.

“No such thing!” Boyne retorted.  “I was fifteen in June.”

“Dear me!  I should never have thought it,” said his sister.

Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had seen it already.  She said at last, with a quiet sigh, “I never want to go away.”