make sure that there were no bits of fluff on the chair.
But Constance had come in; and, when the old lady saw her, she half-rose, threw herself into her daughter's arms and began to sob more violently than she had done. It was strange how she had gradually come to look upon Constance once more as the nearest to her of her children, this daughter whom she had not seen for years and years, until at last Constance had returned to Holland and the family. As a mother, she had never had a favourite; yet she would often, for months at a time, feel drawn now more towards the one, then again towards the other. She was growing old, she was getting the broken look which a mother's face begins to wear as she sees sorrow coming into her children's lives: a sorrow which, in her case, arrived so late that by degrees the illusion had come to her that there would never be any sorrow. The sudden break-up of Bertha's house—that house which she was so fond of visiting, because she found in it the continuation of her own life, the reflection of her own past grandeur—had fallen on her as a painful blow: Van Naghel's sudden death; the sort of apathy into which Bertha had sunk; the divorce between Van Raven and Emilie after Emilie had refused to come back from abroad, preferring to stay in Paris with her brother Henri, who had been sent down from Leiden: a divorce obtained in the
