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Rh to remain cool. After lunch, when she was alone with her husband, she said:

“Now tell me what it is all about.”

“On one condition, that you keep calm. I want to avoid a scene if I possibly can, if only for the sake of our boy, who has been very unhappy.”

“I am quite calm. Tell me what it is. Why has he been unhappy?”

He now told her. She kept calm. She first tried to gloss things over, in a spirit of contradiction; but she was overcome with a deep sense of depression when she thought of her boy and his trouble. For one torturing moment, she doubted whether she had not been very wrong to return to her native land, to her native town, in the midst of all her relations. But she merely said:

“Slander. . . that appears to be people’s occupation everywhere. . . .”

Now that she seemed calm, he resolved to tell her everything and said that he had been to the Van Saetzemas and threatened Jaap.

Her temper was roused, for a moment, but subsided again in the profound depression that immediately left her numb and disheartened. The torturing pain followed again and the doubt whether she had not been quite wrong. . ..

But she did not give utterance to the doubt and simply went to the “turret-room,” where her boy was:

“Are you going out, Addie?” she asked, vaguely, calm amid her depression.