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Rh love for the house and household and the fact of living there—he was indeed his grandparents' grandchild—so she loved the Hague greatly. She loved those green villa-lined roads, she loved the briny fragrance of the sea. . . . She was now riding along the Ornamental Water, now, suddenly, along the spot where she remembered meeting Brauws years ago—he sitting on that bench yonder—when, after she had turned round with a start, he caught her up; and her confession, that she had suggested a divorce to Henri. . . . Oh, those days, those days of life and suffering and illusion, so far, so far away in the distant past! . . . And now, now the man drove with his jog-trot, the jog-trot of a victoria hired by the hour, along the Kerkhoflaan; now she was riding past the old house. . . . Oh, that old house! It was as though the past, the illusion, the suffering and the life, the later, later life, were still hanging around it like a low-drifting cloud! It was the trees of yore and the skies of yore and the green spring life of yore. The house, the house: there was the window at which she had so often sat musing, gazing at the great skies overhead, while her soul travelled along a path of light. Up above were Addie's little turret-room and her own bedroom: oh, that night of illusion at the open window, with the noiseless flashes of hope over the sea, the distant sea yonder! . . . She felt almost inclined to stop, to alight, to ask leave to go over the house; but something in the curtains, in the outline of a woman sketching at the window of her former boudoir prevented her; and she rode on. Oh, how she loved her Hague; and yet. . . yet she had suffered there, with what antipathy she had been surrounded! . . . Did that antipathy of small souls for small souls go on for ever? Must her poor boy now suffer through it, even though he