Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/142

136 the broad, black, silent gestures of their sails, loomed up and disappeared as she shot past.

Fortunately it had begun to freeze. It seemed to her as if, suddenly, in these days of winter pastime, she had found her husband again, as if she half felt that he was finding her again! He did love her then? He was not quite indifferent to her? Through her glove, she felt his hand glowing in hers; she felt the swift rhythm of their hips as a voluptuousness; and she could have hung round his neck because he took her with him like that, rushing, rushing over the straight streaks of endless smooth ice!

"Addie, Addie, you do love me, don't you?"

Amid the swift movement she looked at him and laughed; and his eyes turned, with a little laugh, to her. Oh, how they knew how to laugh, those great, earnest eyes of his, with the often strange blue spark, like a flash of secret fire, which she sometimes did not understand but which she understood now! For what else did it mean, that flash, than that he loved her too, that he thought her pretty? And was he not telling her with his eyes as he had often told her in words that he loved her because she was so attractive, so palpably healthy and pretty and that it was this that attracted him in her: her pink-and-white complexion, her rounded form, her young and vigorous limbs? Then she felt him akin to herself, a young man, a man made young again, a man with a clear, materialistic soul; and in this man she read the young doctor, who loved her healthy body, her rich, healthy blood, weary as he must be of the morbid nerves of his mother's family! Oh, those Van Lowe's: she hated them all, she felt herself to belong to another race! And was Addie himself, like his father, not healthy, simply healthy and manly, a good-looking young fellow, a man,