little sad at the thought of Gertrude, who was dead.

And so the weeks passed and the months, very quietly, lonely and
monotonously: the dreary months of the unseasonable cold, wet autumn,
with heavy storms whipping the trees in the Kerkhoflaan, the wind
incessantly howling round the house, the rain clattering down. Constance
hardly ever went out, shut herself up indoors, as though her soul had
received a hurt, as though she would rather henceforward remain safe in
her dear rooms. She was very silent, she looked pale, she often sat
thinking, pondering--she hardly knew what--sunk in her melancholy,
staring at the fury of the storm outside. She did not often have scenes
with Van der Welcke now, as though a brooding sadness had numbed her
nerves. At half-past four, she would go to the window and watch
longingly for her son, would cheer up a little when she saw him, when he
talked nicely and pleasantly, her boy who was becoming more of a man
daily. But she did not see very much of him now that he went to the
grammar-school and had a lot of work to do in the evenings, which,
studious by nature, he did conscientiously. Van Vreeswijck came to
dinner once every two or three weeks, generally alone, or perhaps, as
Paul was still abroad, she would ask Marianne van Naghel, of whom she
was very fond. It would be one of those cosy, daintily-arranged little
dinners which she knew so well how to give; and that was the extent of
her social doings.

Thus she lived in herself and in her house. The rooms in which she sat
always reflected herself, a woman of elegant and refined taste, even
though she was not exactly artistic; and those rooms displayed in
particular the inhabited, sociable, home-like appearance that comes from
the presence of a woman who is much indoors and finds solace in her
home. And round about her the lines and colours of her furniture and
flowers, her knicknacks and fancy-work all made an atmosphere of soft
fragrance peculiarly her own, with something very personal, something
delicate and intimate: a soft dreaminess as of really very small, simple
femininity, without one really artistic object anywhere, without a
single water-colour or drawing or fashionable novel; and yet with
nothing in colour or form or line that could offend the eye of an
artist: on the contrary, everything blending into a perfect harmony of
small material things with inner personal things that likewise had no
greatness....

One day, when Truit