the motherly voice which she used when speaking to any of her children—even to Bertha, who was fifty—and which she had never learnt to give up. “You’re a dear girl to have taken so much trouble. And it’s very nice of all the others to come to-night, for I know it means a great effort to some of them to forgive and forget and to take back Constance as a sister. And I appreciate it all the more. . . .”
Mrs. van Lowe said this in a tone of approval, but a little autocratically, as though she granted her children a right to their own opinion but yet thought it only natural that they should obey their mother’s wish. And she and Dorine watched the servants putting out the card-tables: one in the big drawing-room, one in the second drawing-room and one in the boudoir. It was the sacred Sunday, the evening of the “family-group,” as the grandchildren naughtily called it among themselves. Every Sunday, Mamma collected as many Van Lowes, Ruyvenaers, Van Naghels and Saetzemas as she could, minding the name less than whether they were relations, even though they were only relations of relations. It was all brother and sister, uncle and aunt, cousin and cousin. Years ago, the Van Lowes—Papa, the retired governor-general, and Mamma—had instituted that Sunday gathering of the members of the family who happened to be at the Hague; and they had all, as far as possible, kept themselves free on Sunday evenings to come to the “family-group.” This very regularity bore witness to the close bonds connecting the several families. Uncle Ruyvenaer
