With this excuse and that, however, she escaped from them all, for Lysbeth had already made her own arrangements.
At that date there was living in Leyden a young man of four or five and twenty, named Dirk van Goorl, a distant cousin of her own.

Dirk was a native of the little town of Alkmaar, and the second son of one of its leading citizens, a brass founder by trade.

As in the natural course of events the Alkmaar business would descend to his elder brother, their father appointed him to a Leyden firm, in which, after eight or nine years of hard work, he had become a junior partner.

While he was still living, Lysbeth's father had taken a liking to the lad, with the result that he grew intimate at the house which, from the first, was open to him as a kinsman.

After the death of Carolus van Hout, Dirk had continued to visit there, especially on Sundays, when he was duly and ceremoniously received by Lysbeth's aunt, a childless widow named Clara van Ziel, who acted as her guardian.