Old Mrs. van Lowe had taken a furnished villa at Nunspeet for a few weeks and gone to stay there with Adeline and her flaxen-haired little tribe. She wanted to be near Ernst; and the doctors had not objected to her going to Nunspeet and even seeing him once or twice: there was no question of an isolation-cure; on the contrary, the patient had always been too lonely; and something in the way of kindly sympathy, which would counteract his shyness, might even have a salutary effect.
Gerrit ran down once or twice from the Hague. But there was hardly room for him in the villa, which was full up with the children's little beds; and also he was secretly hurt that Ernst had taken a dislike to him. And, when he was back at the Hague, alone in his house, he pondered over it all, over the difference and the resemblance between them: Ernst belonging to the dark Van Lowes, Papa's blood; he, like Constance and Paul, to the fair ones, Mamma's blood, though they all had black or at least very dark-brown eyes, with that rather hard, beady glance. But what struck him as very singular was that he more or less understood why Ernst had become as he was: a little odd, he
