skies can be deeply sorrowful between the brown walls of a house, between the dark curtains of a room, which the grey daylight enters as a tarnish of pain, mingling its tarnish with the reflexion which lingers from former years in dull mirrors, as though all feeling and all life were quiveringly mirrored in the atmosphere amid which life has lived and palpitated?
Brauws was now living at Zeist and he had collected his heap of books around him and lived there quietly, conquered, as he said. But he was with them a great deal and was hardly surprised when, one morning, intending to come for lunch, he heard unknown children's voices in the hall, saw in the hall a young woman whom he did not know at first, heard her say in a very soft voice of melancholy, with a sound in it like a little cracked bell of silvery laughter:
"Don't you recognize me, Mr. Brauws?"
She put out her hand to him:
"Do you mean to say you really don't know me? Aunt Constance, Mr. Brauws doesn't know me; and yet we used to have so many disputes, in the old days!"
"Freule . . . Freule van Naghel . . . Freule Marianne!" Brauws stammered.
"Mrs. van Vreeswijk," said Marianne, correcting him, gently. "And here are my children."
And she showed him a little girl of eight and two boys of seven and six; and he was hardly surprised, but he felt the melancholy of the past rising in the big house when Van der Welcke came down the stairs and said:
"Ah, Marianne! Is that you and the children?"
"Yes, Uncle, we have been to Utrecht to look up Uncle and Aunt van Vreeswijk: they are so fond of
