In a small town like the Hague, the sudden appearance of Constance and her husband, after many years, could not but be the occasion for an interchange of gossip that was not easily silenced. The Van Lowe family had connections in various sets—the aristocratic set, the upper official world, the military set, the Indian set—and, just because of these connections in more than one set, there arose a crossfire of criticism and condemnation, neither of which had lost any of its sharpness, even though people had not given a thought to Constance for years. On the contrary, the gossip was a sort of raking up of all that could be remembered of former days, a repetition of all the criticism and all the condemnation which these very people, for the most part, fifteen years ago, had passed among themselves, from one to another, as so much current coin. If it had sometimes seemed to Constance as though the period of her absence contracted and was no longer twenty years, to all those people who knew her, or knew her relations, or knew relations of her relations, that interval had no existence whatever; and it was as though the scandal dated from yesterday, as though she had married her lover, Van der Welcke, yesterday. And, while she herself, in her gentle happiness and melancholy contentment at being back among her kinsfolk, in her country, for which she
