The old lady was sitting silently at the window—in the grey morning, which seemed spent and weary with the wind out of doors—and her thoughts were following a far course of their own in misty days of long ago. Klaasje came up to her. The child had two heavy books under her arm, bound volumes of The Graphic and L'Illustration, and walked bent under them; then she dropped them, clumsily. . . . Cross with the weight of the books, she beat them angrily, but the hard boards hurt her little hand; and so she decided to drag them to Granny, the naughty books which refused to come: she dragged them by the open bindings which had hurt her so; she tore them a bit, but that was their own fault, because they wouldn't be carried. . . . Satisfied with her revenge in tearing the books, she closed the bindings contentedly; the books lay at Granny's feet, against her foot-warmer; and now Klaasje dragged up a hassock too, pushed it against Granny's dress and, kneeling on the hassock, asked Granny, in a motherly fashion:
"Granny! . . . Granny! . . . Granny like to look at pictures?"
The old woman, with a vague, misty glance, slowly turned her head towards the child, whose fair hair fell loosely round the rather thin, sharp little face, from which the over-bright eyes shone strangely, hard and staring. The voice—"Granny look at pictures?"—rang strangely kind, but too childish for a big girl of twelve, with a maturing figure. It was too maternal towards the old woman:
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