"It's getting dark ... it's getting dark," he muttered, shivering, while his teeth chattered with the cold.
And he felt that it was not the cold of fever, but a cold in his veins and his spine, because the beast had sucked all his blood and marrow with its voluptuous licks, had eaten him up from the days of his childhood, had devoured him until now, in the twilight, his soul shrank and withered in his body, which had no more sap to feed it....
"It's getting dark," he muttered.
CHAPTER XXVII
It was snowing heavily. For days the great snowflakes had been falling over the small town out of an infinite sky-land, out of infinite sky-plains of infinite snow. And, after all the gloom of the dark days that had been, the days under the grey skies of storm and rain, it was now snowing whiter and whiter out of a denser greyness of sky-plains and sky-land, flakes falling upon flakes in a soft white shroud of oblivion that enveloped houses and people. And, in that ever-falling snow from the great, grey infinity above the small town and the small people, the town seemed still smaller, with the outline of its houses now scarcely defined against the all-effacing oblivion, which fell and fell without ceasing, and the people also seemed still smaller, as they moved about the town or looked through the windows of their small houses at the white flakes descending from the grey infinity overhead.
For old Mrs. van Lowe the white days dragged on monotonously from Sunday to Sunday: only the Sunday gave her a glimpse of light; but the other days had become so white and blank, so white and blank in their twilight emptiness. Even though the children called to see her regularly, she no longer knew that they had been. It was only on Sundays that she missed them: when she did not see all of those whom she still carried in her mind gathered in her large rooms, rooms which not the largest fires now seemed able to warm, a mournful reproach swelled up in her heart; and her head nodded in sad understanding and protest against the sorrows of old age....
"But here is Ernst, Mamma, coming again as he used to," said Constance, leading Ernst by the hand to her mother.
He now came up once a week from Nunspeet, for the day, in order to reaccustom himself to all the familiar things at the Hague, to the houses and the people; and, though still a little shy, as usual, he had lost all his nervous restlessness and become quite calm.
"Ernst?" asked Mamma.