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52 And she smiled and held out both her hands to him.

He smiled back and said:

"Ssh! Don't wake them."

"No, no. But do get up."

He gave way at last and, grasping her hands warily, allowed her to pull him up, out of his corner, and once more said, earnestly:

"You must promise me not to wake them. All my visitors wake them, the brutes! The doctor woke them too."

"No, Ernst, we'll let them sleep. There, it's nice of you to have got up. Shall we sit down here?"

"Yes. Why have you come? You never come to see me. . . ."

There was in his words an unconscious reproach that startled her. It was quite true: she never came to see him. Since that first time, eighteen months ago, when he had asked her to his rooms on her return to Holland, the day when she had lunched here with him, when he had toasted her with two fingers of champagne out of a quaint old glass, she had never once been back. She reproached herself for it now: she, who did feel all that affection for her family, why had she left that brother to himself, as all the others did, just because he was queer? If she had overcome that vague feeling of distaste, almost of repugnance; if she had felt for him