I will explain that to you. Don’t you believe that we loved our Max more after his illness? Now, it appears to me that I shall love poor Lebak still more, after it has recovered from the cancer from which it has suffered for so many years. The thought of promotion frightens me, and yet on the other side, when I think again that we have debts. . . .”
“All will be right, Max! even if you had to go from here, then you could help Lebak afterwards on being made Governor-General.”
Then came wild lines in Havelaar’s patternthere was anger in those flowers, . . . those strips were sharp, angular, crossing each other. . . . Tine understood that she had said something wrong.
“Dear Max!” she began kindly.
“A curse on it! . . . Will you have them starve so long? . . . . Can you live on sand?”
“Dear Max! . . .”
But he jumped up from his chair, and there was no more drawing that evening.
He went up and down in the inner gallery, and at last he spoke in a tone which would have sounded rough and hard to every stranger, but which was thought of quite differently by Tine.
“A curse on this indifference, this shameful indifference! Here I have waited a month for justice, and meanwhile the poor people are suffering terribly. The Regent seems
