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Rh "But you have never found each other," he said, faintly; and his voice broke.

She looked at him; she understood that he too had not found his wife. She saw it: he was not happy in himself. A sword seemed suddenly to cut through her soul; and she was filled with self-reproach as from a well. Was it not all her fault, that her son was not happy now? . . . Was it not the result of his childhood, the result of his upbringing? . . . The melancholy that had come after the excessive earnestness of his first youth. . . was it not her fault?

But she merely answered his words mechanically:

"No," she said, "we have never found each other."

He would have wished to tell her now. . . about his journey, about the old man, who had died, over there, near Haarlem. But he could not; a feeling of discouragement prevented him. And they remained sitting without speaking, close together, with her hand in his. After his father, after his mother had both, so soon after each other, spoken to him of his own happiness. . . now that feeling of discouragement prevented him, because he saw life enveloping in clouds of darkness at his feet. . . black darkness out of an abyss. . . so that he did not know whither the first steps would lead him. . . . Black darkness and emptiness. . . because he no longer knew, no longer knew what it would be best to say and do. . . . He could no longer speak now of the old man who had died yonder, who had sent for him to tell him that he forgave the two of them—his father, his mother—who had once injured him: he could not do it. Whereas, at the time of his father's words, the black darkness had only whirled in front of him, now that his mother, so strangely, was saying the