Yet the fact should be added that when the old men of Marken talked together about this fine house of Krelis Kess's they would shake their heads a little--saying that a better spending of money would have been for a smaller house founded on solid piling, instead of for this showy dwelling standing on an out-thrust earth bank which well enough might crumble away beneath it in some time of tremendous tempest when all the island should be overswept and beaten by the sea.
For the most part, of course--save for little chats with her neighbours--Marretje was alone in that fine house of hers. Old Jaap had come to live with the young people--as was only fair, since he had no one but his granddaughter to care for him--but both he and Krelis spent all their week-days afloat at their fishing and only their Sundays at home. Yet now and then the old man, making some excuse for not going out with the fleet, would give himself a turn at shore duty; and would sit in his big chair, smoking his long pipe very contentedly, watching his granddaughter at her endless scouring and cleaning, and listening to her little bursts of song. In his unsettled old mind he sometimes fancied that the years had rolled backward and that he was watching his own young wife again; and in his old heart he would dream young love-dreams by the hour together--blessedly forgetting that the love and the happiness which had made his life beautiful had been snatched away from him and lost forever in the wrathful waters of the Zuyder Zee.
[Illustration: "IT WAS A STATELY DWELLING"]
But Marretje's love-dreams were living ones. As Krelis lounged over his pipe of a Sunday morning, taking life easily in his clean Sunday clothes, he would say an airy word or two in praise of her housekeeping that fairly would set her to blushing with happiness--and what with the colour in her fair face and the light in her blue eyes she would be so entirely charming that Krelis's own eyes would go to sparkling, and he would draw her close to him and fondle her in a genuinely loverlike fashion that would fill her with a very tender joy. Krelis was quite sincere in his love-making. His little Marretje's soft beauty, and her shy delight in his caresses, went down into an unsounded depth and touched an unknown strain of gentleness in his easy-going heart.