Yes, it would come, it would come, to-morrow, yes, to-morrow....
And, while that hope still continued to transfigure her face, pale on the pillow in the dawning day, her eyes, blind from long gazing at the light, closed heavily; and she fell asleep, convinced ... convinced....
Chapter XXX
Conviction had conquered doubt and reigned triumphant. When Constance awoke early that morning, she was full of proud, calm confidence, as though she knew the future positively. She hesitated to go to her husband in his room; and he seemed to avoid her too, for as early as seven o’clock she saw him, from her window, riding off on his bicycle. Since their conversation, she had not seen him, did not know what he thought; and it struck her that he was not dashing away, as he had done so often lately, like a madman, but that he pedalled along quietly, with a certain melancholy resignation in his face, which she just saw flickering past under his bicycling-cap.
She listened to hear if Addie was awake, but he seemed to be still asleep; also it was holiday-time. And she began to think of Van Vreeswijck and made up her mind to write to him, just a line, to ask him to come, a single line which however would at once allow him to read, between the letters, that Marianne could not love him.... And, while thinking, with a tender pity for him amid her own calm certainty, she bit her pen, looked out of the window....
The August morning was already sunny at that hour: there was a blue sky with white, fleecy clouds, which passed like flocks of snowy sheep through a blue meadow; the wind urged the sheep before it, like an impetuous drover. And, while she searched for those difficult words, her mind recalled the night before and the lightning yonder, above the sea, which she divined in the distance.... It was strange, but now, in that morning light, with that placid sky at which she gazed, thinking of Van Vreeswijck and how to tell him in a single, merciful word—with that summer blue full of fleecy white, at which she was gazing so fixedly after the ecstasy and winged bliss that had uplifted her the night before—it was as if her calm, proud confidence in her knowledge of the future was wavering.... She did not know why, for after all she thought that Henri would consent to their divorcing....
They would be divorced....
And Marianne would....
Suddenly, she began to write. She wrote more than she intended to write: she now wrote the truth straight away, in an impulse of honesty, and at the end of her letter she asked Van Vreeswijck to call on her that evening.