ssories of another man's work, so that
they came together to-night with no fear of falling out, and spoiling
the musical interludes of Madame van Storck in the large back parlour.
[92] A little way behind the other guests, three of them together, son,
grandson, and the grandfather, moving slowly, came the
Hondecoeters--Giles, Gybrecht, and Melchior. They led the party before
the house was entered, by fading light, to see the curious poultry of
the Burgomaster go to roost; and it was almost night when the
supper-room was reached at last. The occasion was an important one to
Sebastian, and to others through him. For (was it the music of the
duets? he asked himself next morning, with a certain distaste as he
remembered it all, or the heady Spanish wines poured out so freely in
those narrow but deep Venetian glasses?) on this evening he approached
more nearly than he had ever yet done to Mademoiselle van Westrheene,
as she sat there beside the clavecin looking very ruddy and fresh in
her white satin, trimmed with glossy crimson swans-down.

So genially attempered, so warm, was life become, in the land of which
Pliny had spoken as scarcely dry land at all. And, in truth, the sea
which Sebastian so much loved, and with so great a satisfaction and
sense of wellbeing in every hint of its nearness, is never far distant
in Holland. Invading all places, stealing under one's feet,
insinuating itself everywhere along an endless network of canals (by no
means such formal channels as we understand by the name, but
picturesque rivers, with sedgy banks and [93] haunted by innumerable
birds) its incidents present themselves oddly even in one's park or
woodland walks; the ship in full sail appearing suddenly among the
great trees or above the garden wall, where we had no suspicion of the
presence of water. In the very conditions of life in such a country
there was a standing force of pathos. The country itself shared the
uncertainty of the individual human life; and there was pathos also in
the constantly renewed, heavily-taxed labour, necessary to keep the
native soil, fought for so unselfishly, there at all, with a warfare
that must still be maintained when that other struggle with the
Spaniard was over. But though Sebastian liked to breathe, so nearly,
the sea and its influences, those were considerations he scarcely
entertained. In his passion for Schwindsucht--we haven't the word--he
found it pleasant to think of the resistl