Constance, after this talk with Bertha, for days felt easier in her mind, as though filled with an indefinable contentment that bid fair to soothe and heal. Yes, she hoped that, gradually, she would win them all back like that, all her near ones, whom she had lost for years. She saw Mamma daily; and in these regular meetings between mother and child there was the sweetness of finding each other after long years of almost uninterrupted separation, a sweetness touched with a melancholy that held no bitterness, a mingling of glad tears and smiles over the happiness of it all. Also, Constance had now found Bertha again; and, though they did not see each other until Mamma’s Sunday-evening, still there was more sisterly confidence between them, while Marianne grew to like running in at the Kerkhoflaan and would stay to dinner or go cycling with Van der Welcke and Addie. In this way, light bonds were established. As for Karel and Cateau, Constance was sorry, for in Karel she still remembered the brother with whom she used to play on the boulders in the river at Buitenzorg; but she had felt at once that she must not expect much from Karel, now that he and his wife had become mutual images of placid egotism, wrapped in their well-fed, middle-class life, in the sheltered comfort of their warm, shut house. No, Karel, she felt, she had lost, though they were
