Betsy gave Frans a grateful look for touching that point.
“Oh, well, how can you help that?” cried Henk impatiently. “People will always talk.”
“Yes, that’s true enough; but anyhow you come round to my house as soon as you can to-morrow, and see if you can’t persuade Eline to return home. That is, of course, if she is not ill; just now I thought she was rather feverish. So you had better let her rest a bit now; but come as early as possible to-morrow.”
“All right,” said Henk, with a dazed look.
“I believe she was delirious when I went out to fetch a cab, but still she seemed very determined. She would not go back, and she gave me her keys. She asked me”—and he looked at Betsy—“to arrange her things here and pack them. But I think she said it all in her passion; I hope in any case that by this time to-morrow we shall have come to some amicable arrangement.” [[243]]
“Look here, Ferelyn!” said Betsy uneasily; “you can well understand the despair I am in. Good gracious, it isn’t the first tiff I have had with Eline, but who could imagine her capable of such a mad freak as this? And as you say, all the Hague will be talking about it. Therefore if you can manage to persuade her to come back, I shall be for ever grateful to you. Our house is always open to her; and as for those keys, you had better leave them here. I am of your opinion, and think it will all come right yet. Good heavens! what a blessing that she came to you! But in such a night as that, alone, out in that storm! How could she have done it? Good heavens! How could she have done it?”
Frans had still to talk about one or two matters with Henk, who asked him to stay till the morning, as Frans had sent his cab away, and the weather was still frightfully boisterous. Gerard conducted Frans to Henk’s dressing-room, where he removed his wet clothes.
Early next morning Henk drove with Frans to an oculist. It was only a vein that had burst in Henk’s eye, and after a little grain of glass had been removed from it with a lancet, he felt greatly relieved. But across his cheek there was a long, ugly cut.
“I look as though I had been in the war,” said he, with an attempt at a smile to Ferelyn, as soon as they were in the carriage again, on their way to the Hugo de Grootstraat, “and indeed, old fellow, it does seem as if we were all at war just now. I have got enough of it already.”
Ferelyn could not help pitying him when he saw that kindly honest face suffused with a gloomy melancholy. It was evident enough that Henk looked forward with a deal of misgiving to the interview with Eline. But the ordeal was spared him. Eline passionately refused to receive him, and in the adjoining room he sat and listened anxiously to the reproaches she levelled at Frans. Why did Frans want to bring him? Why had she given Frans her keys? Was Frans, too, no longer to be trusted?