On reaching my rooms at Ferdinand Bolstraat 66a, the landlady greeted me with respectful effusion and told me that Jan was as good as cured, though the wounded arm would remain stiff for a good while, she feared. She was loud in the praises of the Engelsche juffrouw and her profisciency in Dutch; and (sinking her voice confidentially) Mijnheer van Leeuwen had left a letter for me upstairs.

“Boyton”, I thought, as I climbed those forty nine precipitous steps that led to my room, “I hope you have done your duty.”

And he had.

Van Leeuwen wrote that he would prepare me for a great surprise! It was yet a profound secret; but,—well, in fact—that is to say—he was engaged to my cousin Kathleen. They had discovered mutual sympathies and affinities over the study of Dutch—to which language now my cousin was devoting her serious attention. By the by they had been delighted with that monograph of mine. And the queer Grammar was useful. (I should think so!)

He said that he could well imagine my astonished looks when I got this news about his attachment! Now confess, he concluded, that you hadn’t the ghost of a suspicion as to what was coming?

“Oh hadn’t I just?” I soliloquized, “Well; there’s only one thing, my dear fellow, to say to all that; And I really must say it in Dutch: Of ik?”