"Green, yellow, blue."
Addie relieved Grandmamma of the book, put it down and began to arrange the dominoes in the box.
"It's been blowing," said the old woman, pointing through the window. "There are great branches lying in the garden."
CHAPTER VII
Then Adeline came in, looking for Addie. He was so tired yesterday that she had not cared to ask him the result of his visit to Amsterdam, but now, while he was still playing with Klaasje, she glanced at him with questioning eyes. She was still a young woman, no more than forty, for she had married Gerrit early and then borne him a child every year; but, despite her gentle, round, fair face, she was no longer young in appearance. Her lines had become matronly; and, especially after the great sorrow, after her husband's suicide, which had plunged her and the children into perpetual shadow like an indelible twilight, she had become so spiritless in all her simple energies that she came like a child to Constance or Addie about anything that concerned any one of them: mostly to Addie, whom she had taken to regarding as her inevitable protector. She looked up at him with respectful confidence; she always did literally what he told her to; it was he who controlled their whole little fortune, investing it as profitably as possible for the children; notwithstanding his youth, she turned to him in all that concerned her boys; and the boys themselves accepted it, inevitably, that their cousin, who was only six or seven years older than they, should look after their interests with paternal earnestness. But Adeline was well aware that Addie was very angry that Alex had had to leave Alkmaar. At first, things had gone fairly well in the secondary school at the Hague; after the third form—he was seventeen by this time—he had just succeeded in passing his matriculation; but, when he took two years over his first examination and failed in the second, Addie himself had considered that Alex had better look out for something different, however much his mother, with her mind full of Gerrit, would have liked to see her eldest son an officer....
By this time, he was nearly twenty; and it was so late for him to go to the Merchants' School at Amsterdam that Addie had decided first to obtain all the details for himself and therefore had gone to Amsterdam, to see the head-master.... That was why, this morning, Adeline came to talk to Addie, a little nervously, rather frightened of what he might say, because he had been exceedingly dissatisfied about Alex, discouraged, not knowing what to do with him next.... He would like to have a talk with Alex, he said; and Adeline, sad about her son and rather frightened of Addie, went to fetch Alex and brought him back with her. He was tall, slender, pale, fair-haired: he did not look strong, although he had resembled his father, especially as a child; every year his features seemed to become more and more fixed and his face became like a spectral mask of pallor, with the look in the eyes a little shy under the lashes, as with a timorous, bashful and at the same time deep inner concealment of invisible, silent things.... Now that his mother had come to fetch him from the room where he sat reading, he came in with her, evidently nervous about the coming talk with Addie. But Addie said:
"I ought really to be going out, Aunt.... Alex, can you go with me part of the way? Then we can talk things over as we walk. The roads are too wet for cycling."
Addie's eyes and voice set Adeline's mind at ease, as though he were telling her that it would be all right at the Merchants' School....
The cousins left the house together. The trees dripped with water; and the swift and angry wind chased the great clouds farther in one direction; but the sky remained grey and lowering. The far-stretching, straight country-roads vanished at last in a melancholy drab mist; and the two young men at first walked along without a word.