felt it yet—from the first time that she had come and waited in this hall, sitting on the oak settle, with her hand on the shoulder of her boy, the grandchild whom she had come to introduce to his grandparents. . . . Oh, what a gloomy house it was, with that long hall and that dark door at the end of it, with those portraits and those old engravings, only brightened by the gleam of the Delft on the old oak cabinet! Oh, what a gloomy house it was and how strange was the presentiment that she would so often be coming here now, that she would have to mingle some part of herself with this gloomy Dutch domestic atmosphere! . . . Shuddering, shivering, still in her fur cloak, she was thrilled with a very swift and fleeting home-sickness for her dear, cosy house in the Woods, at the Hague, and she did not know when she would go back to it now. . . . The old woman was ill; Henri had gone first; Addie had followed him. . . . Then she had asked for Constance; and Constance had taken the first train. . . .
She had asked Piet in the hall how mevrouw was, but she had not taken in his answer either. She now went up the stairs, which wound in their ascent and were quite dark; and, because the strange presentiment also forced itself upon her on the stairs, she resisted it, put it from her. How strange everything seemed around her and within her! Was that the approach of death, skulking along with the
