dress, so as not to keep them waiting too long downstairs, Constance still heard her boy say, in his calm, confident voice:
"Papa . . . Mamma . . . we have a big house now, a very big house. . . . We are rich now . . . and Aunt Adeline has nothing . . . the children have only a couple of thousand guilders apiece. . . . They must all come to us now, mustn't they, all come and live with us at Driebergen, mustn't they, Papa . . . and Mamma?"
He said nothing beyond those few simple words; and his confident voice was as quiet as though his proposal spoke for itself, as though it were quite commonplace. . . .
"What is there to make a fuss about?" he had asked, with wide-open eyes, when she fell upon his neck with tears of emotion and kissed him, her heart swelling with happiness in her child. . . .
She had just looked round anxiously at her husband, anxious what he would wish, what he would say to his son's words. . . . There were fewer scenes between them, it was true, much fewer; but still she had thought to herself, what would he say to this? . . . But he had only laughed, burst out laughing, with his young laugh like a great boy's . . . laughed at all his son's great family: a wife and nine children whom Addie at sixteen was quietly taking unto himself, because his people had money now and a big house. . . . Since that time Van der Welcke had always chaffed the boy about his nine children. And Addie answered his father's chaff with that placid smile in his eyes and on his lips, as though he were thinking:
"Have your joke, Daddy. You're a good chap after all! . . . "
And Addie had interested himself in his nine children as calmly as if they were not the least
