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Rh cloth straight, put a chair into its proper place, smoothed away a crease in the curtain. She went into the conservatory, looked into the back-garden. Her sad grey eyes gazed out into the grey melancholy of the darkling night. The wind rose, moaned softly through the topmost twigs of the trees.

The old woman looked round at the old man, but he remained sitting in the wicker chair, lost in the great pages of his newspaper:

“Don’t catch cold, Hendrik,” she repeated, gently.

“I’m coming.”

But the old man remained sitting where he was. Now the old woman wandered down the passage, listened at the door of the kitchen and of a small back-room: voices sounded, the voices of the maids and the butler. Then she went up the stairs, wandered through the bedrooms, wandered through the empty spare-rooms, with a sigh, because they never came. Everything was neatly kept, hushed and quiet, as in a house that lacks life. . ..

The old woman, bent and tottering, sighed, was restless. She wandered again through all the bedrooms and wearily made her way downstairs again, crossed the passage, entered the living-room. The old man was seated there now; the windows into the garden were closed. He had folded up his paper and, seated by the window, was still gazing out to where the road of villas grew darker and darker in the chill dimness of the late-summer evening, now beginning to rustle with the rising wind. Then,