She had half-raised herself and was looking at Jules with a vacant air. In an instant the memory ran through her brain of the long look which Jules had directed on her so strangely when she saw Quaerts for the first time and spoke to him coolly and distantly:
“Have you many relations in The Hague?... You have no occupation, I believe?... Sport?... Oh!...”
Then came the memory of Jules playing the piano, of Rubinstein’s Romance, of the ecstasy of his fantasia: the glittering rainbows and the souls turning to angels.
“To take leave?” she repeated.
Jules nodded:
“Yes, Auntie, he is going away for ever so long.”
He could have shed tears himself and there were tears in his voice, but he would not give way and his eyes merely grew moist.
“He told me to ask you,” he repeated, with difficulty.
“If he can come and take leave?”
“Yes, Auntie.”