VII
THE CARTRIDGE PLANT
That day in May the fogs of an exceptionally stubborn winter had scattered, to leave floating in the air only a diaphanous evaporation through which the azure tendered the interesting pallor of convalescence, and which became irridescent, in the radiant sunlight, like a mist of fine pearls.
After a long illness contracted on the morrow of his stormy Mardi Gras, Laurent, as convalescent as the season, left, for the first time, the hospital where the practitioners had saved him in spite of himself and less, without doubt, for interest in him than in order to triumph over one of the most stubborn and most complex cases of typhoid that had ever been met with in the establishment.
Put back upon his feet, returned to the life of the outside world, he seemed to have come back from a long and perilous voyage, as if pardoned from an exile that had lasted for years. And so never before, even on the day of his return to Antwerp, had the metropolis appeared to him with this aspect of power, splendor and serenity.
At the harbor, the activity was feeling the effects of the spring-like temperature. The recent famine caused by the blocking of the Scheldt had not persisted after
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