any one to talk to, except him, my little son! It wasn’t right of Mamma, was it, Addie, to be always talking to you? But I couldn’t speak out to Henri, to Van der Welcke. Oh, we are very good friends, quite good friends! . . . I can’t tell you how, all of a sudden, I longed for the Hague, for my family, for the people I used to know, for all of you, for everything! I always wrote to Mamma regularly; and Mamma gave me all the news, sent me the photographs of my little nephews and nieces. And yet my brain’s whirling, now that I am seeing you all. There are such a lot of us: I don’t think there can be many families as big as ours. Bertha’s alone is a big household. . . . Fancy Bertha a grandmother! . . . It’s dreadful, how old we’re growing! I am forty-two! Oh, I couldn’t have gone on living in Brussels! We had no one left there: our friends were scattered, gone away. Van der Welcke, too, was beginning to long for Holland, for Addie’s sake as well as his own. Addie speaks very good Dutch, though: I always made him keep it up. He has a bit of a Flemish accent, perhaps: what do you think, Addie? . . . We had a Flemish servant. . . . Oh, what a lot I have to tell you!” she laughed, happily. “Nothing interesting, you know, but I feel as if I must tell you everything, talk and talk and talk to you, to all of you, my brothers, my sisters!” She suddenly got up. “Karel, do you remember, in India, how we used to play in the river, behind the Palace; how we walked on those great stone boulders, you and I and Gerrit? We three
