In the busy sewing-room the two children are standing up on one of the tables. The commandant has an arm around each of them, for they are a little frightened by so much noise and so many eyes looking at them. The chatter dies down, as he speaks in his gruff authoritative voice, but with a twinkle in his eyes, rather like a middle-aged Santa Claus. “Look here! I've got two fine babies.” A titter runs through the room. _“Ja, Men'eer,”_ says one of the women, “congratulations! They are _lievelingen_--darlings!” “Silence!” growls the commandant amiably. “None of your impudence, you women. Look here! These two children--I want somebody to adopt them, or at least to take care of them. I will pay for them. Their names are Hendrik and--” A commotion at the lower end of the room. A thin, dark little woman is standing up, waving her piece of sewing like a flag, her big eyes flaming with excitement. “Stop!” she cries, hurrying and stumbling forward through the crowd of women and girls. “Oh, stop a minute! They are mine--I lost them--mine, I tell you--lost--mine!” She reaches the head of the table and flings her arms around the boy, crying: “My Hendrik!” The boy hesitates a second, startled by the sudden wildness of her caress. Then he presses his hot little face in her neck. _“Lieve moeder!”_ he murmurs. “Where was you? I looked.” But the thin, dark little woman has fainted dead away. The rest we will leave, as the wise commandant does, to the chief nurse. A SANCTUARY OF TREES The Baron d'Azan was old--older even than his seventy years. His age showed by contrast as he walked among his trees. They were fresh and flourishing, full of sap and vigor, though many of them had been born long before him. The tracts of forest which still belonged to his diminished estate were crowded with the growths native to the foot-hills of the Ardennes. In the park around the small chateau, built in a Belgian version of the First Empire style, trees from many lands had been assembled by his father and grandfather: drooping spruces from Norway, dark-pillared cypresses from Italy, spreading cedars from Lebanon, trees of heaven from China, fern-leaved gingkos from Japan, lofty tulip-trees and liquidambars from America, and fantastic sylvan forms from islands of the Southern Ocean. But the royal avenue of beeches! Well, I must tell you more about that, else you can never feel the meaning of this story. The love of trees was hereditary in the family and antedated their other nobility. The founder of the house had begun life as the son of a forester in Luxemburg. His name was Pol Staar. His fortune and title were the fruit of contracts for horses and provisions which he made with the commissariat of Napoleon I. in the days when the Netherlands were a French province. But though Pol Staar's hands were callous and his manners plain, his tastes were aristocratic. They had been formed young in the company of great trees.