ts of Paris, and I looked with
smiling eyes at the people who hurried to and fro. The day
was fine and sunny, and I felt in myself a more acute delight
in life. I could not help it; I put Stroeve and his sorrows
out of my mind. I wanted to enjoy.

Chapter XXXVIII

I did not see him again for nearly a week. Then he fetched me
soon after seven one evening and took me out to dinner.
He was dressed in the deepest mourning, and on his bowler was a
broad black band. He had even a black border to his handkerchief.
His garb of woe suggested that he had lost in one
catastrophe every relation he had in the world, even to
cousins by marriage twice removed. His plumpness and his red,
fat cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous. It was
cruel that his extreme unhappiness should have in it something
of buffoonery.

He told me he had made up his mind to go away, though not to
Italy, as I had suggested, but to Holland.

"I'm starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we
shall ever meet."

I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly.

"I haven't been home for five years. I think I'd forgotten it all;
I seemed to have come so far away from my father's house
that I was shy at the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel
it's my only refuge."

He was sore and bruised, and his thoughts went back to the
tenderness of his mother's love. The ridicule he had endured
for years seemed now to weigh him down, and the final blow of
Blanche's treachery had robbed him of the resiliency which had
made him take it so gaily. He could no longer laugh with
those who laughed at him. He was an outcast. He told me of
his childhood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother's
passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean
brightness. Everything was always in its place, and no where
could you see a speck of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a
mania with her. I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks
like apples, toiling away from morning to night, through the
long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father was
a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a
lifetime, silent and upright; in the evening he read the paper
aloud, while his wife and daughter (now married to the captain
of a fishing smack), unwilling to lose a moment, bent over
their sewing. Nothing ever happened in that little town, left
behind by the advance of civilisation, and one year followed
the next till