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176 the children. . . . Charles may come on this afternoon. . . but he wasn't quite sure."

And, turning to Brauws, she continued, very easily:

"We are living near Arnhem. Won't you come and see us in the summer? Vreeswijk would be very glad, I know."

She spoke quite easily and it was all very prosaic and ordinary when they all sat down round the big table in the dining-room and Marianne quietly chatted on:

"And Marietje—Lord, what a lot of Marietjes we have in the family—our Marietje is soon coming to introduce her young soldier to you."

"Is it settled then?" asked Constance. "I thought Uncle van Naghel didn't approve."

"He's given in," said Marianne, shrugging her shoulders. "But the dear boy hasn't a cent; and we none of us know how they're going to live on his subaltern's pay. And Marietje who always used to swear that she would only marry a rich man! . . . And we have good news from India: Karel is really doing well. . . ."

How prosaic life was! How prosaically it rolled along its steady drab course, thought Brauws, silently to himself, as he looked on while Guy carved the beef in straight, even slices. . . . And, prosaically though it rolled, what a very different life it always became from what any man imagined that his life would be, from the future which he had pictured, from the illusion, high or small, which he had gilded for himself, with his pettily human fancy ever gilding the future according to its pettily human yearning after illusions. . . . Oh, if the illusion had come about which, in the later life reborn out of themselves, he and Constance had conceived, without a word to each other, in a single,