While Griselda was watching him closely there came a soft tap at the door, and a little girl danced into the room. The dearest little girl you ever saw, and _so_ funnily dressed! Her thick brown hair, rather lighter than Griselda's, was tied in two long plaits down her back. She had a short red skirt with silver braid round the bottom, and a white chemisette with beautiful lace at the throat and wrists, and over that again a black velvet bodice, also trimmed with silver. And she had a great many trinkets, necklaces, and bracelets, and ear-rings, and a sort of little silver coronet; no, it was not like a coronet, it was a band with a square piece of silver fastened so as to stand up at each side of her head something like a horse's blinkers, only they were not placed over her eyes. She made quite a jingle as she came into the room, and the old man looked up with a smile of pleasure. "Well, my darling, and are you all ready for your _fete_?" he said; and though the language in which he spoke was quite strange to Griselda, she understood his meaning perfectly well. "Yes, dear grandfather; and isn't my dress lovely?" said the child. "I should be _so_ happy if only you were coming too, and would get yourself a beautiful velvet coat like Mynheer van Huyten." The old man shook his head. "I have no time for such things, my darling," he replied; "and besides, I am too old. I must work--work hard to make money for my pet when I am gone, that she may not be dependent on the bounty of those English sisters." "But I won't care for money when you are gone, grandfather," said the child, her eyes filling with tears. "I would rather just go on living in this little house, and I am sure the neighbours would give me something to eat, and then I could hear all your clocks ticking, and think of you. I don't want you to sell all your wonderful things for money for me, grandfather. They would remind me of you, and money wouldn't." "Not all, Sybilla, not all," said the old man. "The best of all, the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of my life, shall not be sold. It shall be yours, and you will have in your possession a clock that crowned heads might seek in vain to purchase." His dim old eyes brightened, and for a moment he sat erect and strong. "Do you mean the cuckoo clock?" said Sybilla, in a low voice. "Yes, my darling, the cuckoo clock, the crowning work of my life--a clock that shall last long after I, and perhaps thou, my pretty child, are crumbling into dust; a clock that shall last to tell my great-grandchildren to many generations that the old Dutch mechanic was not altogether to be despised." Sybilla sprang into his arms. "You are not to talk like that, little grandfather," she said. "I shall teach my children and my grandchildren to be so proud of you--oh, so proud!--as proud as I am of you, little grandfather."