Aunt Constance was sitting up till the carriage returned from Utrecht, they all wanted to sit up.
"What an idea!" said Constance, with nervous irritability. "Why don't you all go to bed?"
But they were gathered round her so pleasantly and they stayed up: Addie, Emilie, Adeline, Marietje; but Addie sent Adeletje and Mary to bed.
And they sat waiting downstairs in the night. It was three o'clock when at last they heard the carriage; and Van der Welcke, Gerdy and Guy entered.
"Mathilde is spending the night at the hotel," said Van der Welcke.
"And Uncle made a very sweet chaperon," said Guy, chaffingly.
But Gerdy did not say much, looked tired, very pale, constrained. They went upstairs, to their rooms, and Gerdy kissed her mother. But, without the others seeing it, she followed Adeline to her room and suddenly, unable to contain herself, burst into a paroxysm of tears.
"Darling, darling, what is it?"
And the mother, long since broken, took the girl, now breaking, into her arms and it was as though she suddenly wakened from her apathy and felt herself very much a mother. . . . Oh, she knew that she could not do much for her children, that she was not capable, never had been since Gerrit's death, that without Van der Welcke, Constance and Addie she could not have made anything of her children! Nevertheless, they remained her children; and, if she did not know how to guide her sons in their careers, she did know how to sympathize with her poor Gerdy's sobs.
"Darling, darling, what is it?"
And, dropping into her chair, while Gerdy knelt before her in the folds of her white-tulle frock, she
