“Good gracious, where have you two been hiding?” cried Marie, while Georges and Lili sat down on the chairs, across which a cloak had been thrown to reserve them. “I have been walking with Paul, and Eline and Otto could not really keep your seats for you any longer.”
“We made almost superhuman efforts to reserve them, did we not, madam?” added Frédérique.
“But where have you been, then?” asked Madame Verstraeten wonderingly. “In the Conversazione Room, looking at the dancing?”
Georges told them of their walk by the sea, and Lili inwardly admired him for the tact with which he replied to her mother’s questioning.
Henk and Vincent were seated by themselves at a table near the Conversazione Room, while Betsy and young Hydrecht were strolling about in a somewhat too boisterous flirtation, and Eline and Otto had sat down for a moment next to Madame Eekhof, whom they had passed by four times without any greeting, as Ange declared.
“I was nearly dead with this terrible heat to-day,” muttered Vincent.
“Yes; Eline can’t bear it either,” answered Henk, emptying his glass of Pilsener.
Vincent drank nothing; he felt rather giddy at the incessant surging round and round of all these people. He rarely went to Scheveningen; in the morning the heat was unbearable on the scorching sand, and at night it tired him too much. Once or twice he went, just for the sake of saying he had been.
A question to Henk was on his lips, one which he scarcely dared to put—a request for money. The second time that Henk had advanced him money, he had not done so with his usual brusque bonhomie. Vere’s eternal impecuniosity was beginning to tire him—it was always the same tune! This had not escaped Vincent; but still he could not help it, and he began with an introduction, with an assumed lightness of manner.
“I think I shall be able to repay you part of my debt this week, [[170]]van Raat. I am expecting money. Only for the moment I am awfully short. If I had not taken advantage of your kindness so often already, I would ask your assistance once more; but I am afraid I’m getting indiscreet now. I shall see and get along just for this week.”