1
Cecile was astonished at her unusually long fit of abstraction, that it should continue for days before she returned to her usual condition of serenity, the delightful abode from which she had involuntarily wandered. But she compelled herself, with gentle compulsion, to recover the treasures of her loneliness; and she ended by recovering them. She argued with herself that it would be some years before she would have to part from Dolf and Christie: there was time enough to grow accustomed to the idea of separation. Besides, nothing had altered either about her or within her; and so she let the days glide slowly over her, like gently flowing water.
In this way, gently flowing by, a fortnight had elapsed since the evening which she spent at Dolf’s. It was a Saturday afternoon; she had been working with the children—she still taught them herself—and she had walked out with them; and now she was sitting in her favourite room waiting for the Van Attemas, who came to tea every Saturday at half-past four. She rang for the servant, who lighted the blue flame of methylated spirit. Dolf and Christie were with her; they sat upon the floor on footstools, cutting the pages of a children’s magazine to which Cecile subscribed for them. They were sitting quietly, looking very good and well-bred, like children who grow up in soft surroundings, in the midst of too much refinement, too pale, with hair too long and too fair, Christie especially, whose little temples were veined as if with azure blood. Cecile stepped by them as she went to glance over the tea-table; and the look which she cast upon them wrapped the children in a warm embrace of devotion. She was in her calmly happy mood: it was so pleasant to think that she would soon see the Van Attemas come in. She liked these hours of the afternoon, when her silver tea-kettle hissed over the blue flame. An exquisite intimacy filled the room; she had in her long, shapely feminine fingers that special power of witchery, that gentle art of handling by which everything over which they merely glided acquired a look of herself, an indefinable something, of tint, of position, of light, which the things had not until the touch of those fingers came across them.
There was a ring. She thought it rather early for the Van Attemas, but she rarely saw any one else in her seclusion from the outer world; therefore it must be they. In a second or two, however, Greta entered, with a card: was mevrouw at home and could the gentleman see her?
Cecile recognized the card from a distance: she had seen one like it lately. Nevertheless she took it up, glanced at it discontentedly, with drawn eyebrows.
What an idea, she reflected. Why did he do it? What did it mean?
But she thought it unnecessary to be impolite and refuse to see him. After all, he was a friend of Dolf’s. But such persistence....
“Show meneer in,” she said, calmly.
Greta went; and it seemed to Cecile as though something trembled in the intimacy which filled the room, as if the objects over which her fingers had just passed took on another aspect, a look of shuddering. But Dolf and Christie had not changed; they were still sitting looking at the pictures, with occasional remarks falling softly from their lips.