“Are you going so soon?”
“Yes, it’s rain-ing so; and the brougham is getting so we-et.”
“Constance,” said Karel. “Did you say that Van der Welcke would be here on Tuesday?”
“I expect so.”
“Well, then, give him my kind regards and . . . and would you give him my card? Then that’ll be all right.”
He took a visiting-card from his pocket-book and laid it on a corner of the console-table. Constance looked at him in momentary perplexity. She could not speak for a second or two, did not understand. She herself had been brought up and had lived according to very punctilious rules of card-leaving; but yet she failed to understand how one brother-in-law could leave a card on another brother-in-law, before that other was in town and during a visit paid in his sister’s bedroom, amid all the muddle of her unpacked trunks. But she had been so long away from Holland and the Hague; she did not wish it to appear that she did not understand; and, as a woman of the world, she did not, above all, wish it to appear that she thought Karel’s performance with the card not only stiff, but intensely vulgar.
She said, with a gentle smile.
“Thank you, Karel. Van de Welcke will appreciate your call greatly.”
Her voice sounded friendly and natural; and neither Karel nor Cateau had any idea that Constance had controlled herself as she had sometimes
