"I am sure," she said, "Rem might have learned a lesson from my sad fortune. What does he want to marry a foreigner for? He ought to have prevented me from doing so, instead of following my foolish example."
"No one could have prevented you, Arenta. You would not listen even to your father."
"Oh indeed, it was my fate. We must all submit to fate. Why did you refuse Rem?"
"He was not my fate, Arenta."
"Well then, neither is George Hyde your fate. Aunt Jacobus has told me some things about him. She says he is to marry his cousin. You ought to marry Rem."
As she said these words Van Ariens, accompanied by Joris Van Heemskirk entered the room, and Cornelia was glad to escape. She knew that Arenta would again relate all her experiences, and she disliked to mingle them with her renewed dreams of love and her lover.
"She will talk and talk," said Cornelia to her mother, "and then there will be tea and chocolate and more talk, and I have heard all I wish to hear about that dreadful city, and the demons who walk in blood."
"Arenta has made a great sensation, Cornelia," answered Mrs. Moran. "She has received half the town. Gertrude Kippon stole quietly home and has hardly been seen, or heard tell of."
"But mother, Arenta has far more genius than Gertrude. She has made of her misfortunes a great drama, and wherever you go, it is of the Marquise de Tounnerre people are talking. Senator Van Heemskirk came in with her father as I left."
"I hope he treated you more civilly than madame did."
"He was delightful. I courtesied to him, and he lifted my hand and kissed it, and said, 'I grew lovelier every day,' and I kissed his cheek and said, 'I wished always to be lovely in his sight.' Then I came home, because I would not, just yet, speak of George to him."
"Arenta would hardly have given you any opportunity. I wonder at what hour she will release Joris Van Heemskirk!"
"It will be later than it ought to be."
Indeed it was so late that Madame Van Heemskirk had locked up her house for the night, and was troubled at her husband's delay--even a little cross: "An old man like you, Joris," she said in a tone of vexation--" sitting till nine o'clock with the last runaway from Paris; a cold you have already, and all for a girl that threw her senses behind her, to marry a Frenchman."
"Much she has suffered, Lysbet."
"Much she ought to suffer. And I believe not in Arenta Van Ariens' suffering. In some way, by hook or crook, by word or deed, she would out of any trouble work her way."