that he was still too young for his father to discuss everything with him. Then he fell silent, did not insist; but the suspicion never left him and he now knew for certain that there was something, because his father had told him that he was too young to discuss things with him. And so the boy became serious; and, when Van der Welcke came home to dinner from the club, he no longer found his cheerful Addie, who could talk so brightly and fill up the gap between him and Constance with his pleasant, boyish talk. The boy sat in silence, ate in silence, with his young soul full of suspicion, full of silent questionings as to what it really was, if the slanders which people uttered were not true. He loved them so fondly, with that love of his; and it made him profoundly sad that he did not know that thing of the past, because, for want of that knowledge, he was no longer living their life. He now wished that he was older, so as to be able to live their life and have the right to know. And he weighed what he did know in his soul that longed for certainties: he knew that Mamma had been married before and was divorced from the husband whom she never mentioned. Had it been that first husband’s fault? Or had she made him unhappy? Addie did not know and was craving to know. And his longing was no morbid curiosity, but the result of his unnatural upbringing: his longing had come about quite naturally, after his first great sorrow, because his father and mother had both always looked upon him as almost more than their child, as their com-
