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, sturdy boy, who looked like him, with the fixed, earnest, gentle eyes; and he was now going to show him to his parents: her child, it was true, the fruit of their misery, but his child and their grandson. The boy glanced from his father to his mother. They both sat opposite him and both silently looked out of the window, half-turning their backs upon each other. The boy would so gladly have taken their hands, the hands of both of them, and said something: a word to unite them at this moment, which he felt to be very serious; but he did not know the word, cleverly though he knew how to talk as a rule. He glanced from his father to his mother, from his mother to his father; and they, they did not look, dared not look at him, feeling his glance and filled to overflowing with their own thoughts. Then the boy felt life sinking very heavily, like a weight, upon his small breast. He drew a very deep breath, under the heavy weight, and his breath was a deep sigh. They both now looked up, looked at their child. Henri would have liked to throw out his arms, to feel his child at his heart; but the carriage now turned through a gate and drove along a front garden of rounded lawns, in which the rose-bushes, swathed in straw, stood waiting for the spring. CHAPTER XI They stepped from the carriage; the hall-door opened. The curtains of the front room shook slightly, as though with the trembling touch of an old hand; but there was no one in the hall to receive them except the butler who had opened the door. Then Constance said: "Henri, you go in first. I'll come presently, with Addie, when you call me...." He looked at her, hesitating to say that he himself wished to go in with Addie. But she had laid her hand on the boy's shoulder and looked at Van der Welcke so steadily that he understood that she would not consent. And he went in, staggering like a drunken man, went into the room where the window-curtains had trembled. The butler retired, not knowing what to do. And Constance sat down on the oak settle and drew Addie beside her. So she was meekly waiting in the hall, waiting the pleasure of her father- and mother-in-law; but it was of her own will that she waited now, after waiting nearly fourteen years for a word that would have called her to them. With a woman's delicacy, she had let Henri go in first to his parents; but she had set her mind upon taking her boy to his grand-parents herself. It was for
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