His soft voice calmed the dismay and confusion; and Ottilie said:
"If you think, Harold, that I can tell her, I will go upstairs and try ... I'll try and tell her.... But, if I can't do it, in the course of conversation, then I won't ... then I simply will not tell her...."
She went upstairs, innocent as a child: she did not know. She did not know that her mother, more than sixty years ago, had taken part in a murder, which that old deaf doctor had helped her to hush up. She knew that Takma was her father, but not that he, together with her mother, had murdered the father of her brothers, the father of her sister Thérèse. She went upstairs; and, when she entered the drawing-room, Stefanie and Anton rose to go, so that Mamma might not have too many visitors at a time.
For that matter, it did not tire the old woman to chat—or to sit with a visitor in cosy silence for a little while—so long as the "children" did not all come at once. She was still slightly elated with the young life which she had seen, with Lily van Wely's babies. She had talked about them to Stefanie and Anton, not knowing that the babies were their godchildren: no one had told her that; and she really thought that little Netta's name was Ottilitje and spoke of little Lietje: they knew whom she meant.
Ottilie Steyn was left alone with her mother. She did not speak much, but sat beside her mother, who had taken her hand.... Ah, she herself felt touched! There, in that empty chair, at which the old woman kept staring, old Mr. Takma would never sit again.... Her father! She had loved him as a daughter loves her father! She was inheriting a hundred thousand guilders from him; but never again would he put a hundred-guilder note in her hand, in that kind way of his.
It was as though the old woman guessed some of her daughter's thoughts, for she said, with a movement of her hand towards the chair:
"Old Mr. Takma is ill."
"Yes," said Ottilie Steyn.
The old woman shook her head mournfully:
"I don't expect I shall see him again this winter."