She did not answer, but looked at him. He pressed her in his arms and kissed her.
“In five months’ time then?” he whispered with a smile.
She raised herself up, looked at him fixedly, and then flung her arms round his neck. And she kissed his forehead with a long passionate kiss.
“In—in five months,” she murmured in reply.
CHAPTER XXX.
Uncle Daniel and Aunt Elise were not a bit surprised when Eline, a few days after St. Clare’s and Vincent’s departure, told them that she intended to return to the Hague. They knew how capricious Eline was, how she longed, now for this and now for that, and never was contented. But this time it was not out of caprice that Eline longed for another dwelling-place. After the soirée, at which St. Clare had asked her somewhat brusquely how she got there, it seemed to her as if a veil had risen before her eyes, as if suddenly it was made plain to her that she was [[298]]not in her place with her uncle and aunt, and especially in their coterie, and it was out of respect, out of friendship, perhaps out of love for St. Clare, that she determined to leave her Brussels acquaintances.
She wrote to Henk and asked him to take two rooms for her in a ladies’ boarding-house or in one of the new stately hotels. In reply she received letters from Henk, from Betsy, from old Madame van Raat, all of whom begged her not to go into apartments, but to make her home with them. Betsy wrote her that she forgave and forgot everything that had happened, if Eline on her part would also forgive and forget, and implored Eline not to be so eccentric as to go and live by herself when there was room for her in her sister’s house. Old Madame van Raat, too, wrote very urgently and very affectionately, but Eline refused with repeated professions of gratitude; she was determined that no one should make her change her mind.
Henk, therefore, with a dejected face, shrugged his shoulders, and with Betsy he chose two handsome apartments in a large pension on the Bezuidenhout. Thereupon Eline came to the Hague.
She recollected how the previous summer, worn-out with her wandering, she had come to the Hague to make her stay with Madame van Raat. She compared her languor of those days with the exhaustion which now, as it were, was surely undermining her, and she did not even feel strength to weep about it. For the sake of her regard for St. Clare, she had concentrated the last lingering remnants of strength to be once more as she had been—winning, amiable, if not brilliant; and now that St. Clare was gone, she discovered how, frank and natural as she had been towards him, she had for all that involuntarily, as it were, excited herself so that she should not appear to him altogether the utterly worn-out being, the living corpse that she was. Now that that excitement was no longer necessary, she collapsed, broken down utterly. The emotion caused by her latest confession, too, had greatly unnerved her, and it became to her a certainty that she would never more be able to arouse herself from her physical exhaustion and her moral inanition.