reproaching the
grandparents. There were no indifferent topics; and a despairing gloom
hung between the old people and the child, because they could not reach
the child across their son and their daughter-in-law.... Outside, the
wind rose, howling; the heavy grey clouds descended upon them like a
damp mist; and the rain clattered down. Henri had thought of asking his
father to take him into the garden, to see if he still recognized it,
but the pelting rain prevented him; and he saw nothing but his mother's
tears. In his heart, he laid these to his wife's charge. The past was
piled up as a wall between each soul and its neighbour.

The boy felt it. He felt his breathing oppressed with all that gloom;
and again and again he wanted to sigh, but he kept back his sighs. He
did not know what to say; and he gave his grandparents the impression of
a quiet, subdued child, who was not happy. They spoke to him too as old
people do to a child, with condescending kindness, pointing out the
little things in the room. The boy, who was accustomed to be a man
standing between his two parents, answered nothing except in shy
monosyllables.

Henri and Constance avoided looking at each other; and each of them,
even in the same conversation, talked as it were separately to the old
people. They were to stay to lunch--the old-fashioned Dutch
"coffee-drinking"--and return at five o'clock to the Hague. The butler
came to say that luncheon was served and pushed back the sliding doors.
The dining-room lay on this side of the great, closed conservatory, a
gloomy shadow in the pale daylight that streaked in through the rain;
and the mahogany furniture gleamed with reflected lights, the table
shone white and glassy. They sat down: difficult words fell now and
again and sounded hard in the somewhat chilly room. The old woman with
much ceremony offered a soft-boiled egg, or a tongue-sandwich which lay
neatly arranged with its fellows on a tray. She herself filled the small
china coffee-cups. It all lasted very long, was all very solemn and
proper, with much formality about the egg and the sandwich. Addie felt
as if he could easily swallow both the egg and sandwich in one gulp; and
he had to restrain himself in order to eat the egg slowly and neatly in
little spoonfuls and to chew the sandwich with little bites, so as not
to finish too soon nor deprive the table of its excuse for being so
elaborately laid. He was not sure whether he was still hungry o