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Rh gladly have admitted him to their club, putting up with him because he had plenty of money to spend and because he was clever and it amused him to help them in their examinations. Van der Welcke and Van Vreeswijck had learnt to value his friendship, but nevertheless lost sight of him afterwards, thinking that he had joined his brothers after all and was managing the factory with them. And, even as they, as youths, had hardly known their friend more than superficially, so they did not know, on leaving Leiden, that Max had not gone to Overijssel—where his father would have liked to marry him to the third daughter of the father-in-law of his two other sons—but to America, to "seek."

"Well, but to seek what?" Van der Welcke asked, failing to understand what a rich youth could want to seek in America, if he did not see some idea, some plan, some object plainly outlined before him.

Brauws now confessed that at the time he scarcely knew what he had gone to seek, in America. He admitted that his father, the iron-master, had hoped that Max would form industrial connections in America which would have benefited the factory. But Max had formed no connections at all.

"Then what did you do?" asked Van der Welcke.

And Brauws smiled his strange, gentle smile, in which there gleamed a touch of irony and