und Mamma upstairs, in the double drawing-room, where Klaartje was
lighting the gas:

"They're all coming, Mamma!" Dorine blurted out.

Then, starting when she saw the servant, she whispered:

"I've been to all of them; first to Karel, then to Bertha, then to
Adolphine; no, first to Gerrit...."

She became muddled, laughed, made Mamma sit down beside her and told her
what all the brothers and sisters had said. The old woman's face beamed
with satisfaction. She kissed Dorine:

"You're a dear girl, Dorinetje," she said, with the motherly voice which
she used when speaking to any of her children--even to Bertha, who was
fifty--and which she had never learnt to give up. "You're a dear girl to
have taken so much trouble. And it's very nice of all the others to come
to-night, for I know it means a great effort to some of them to forgive
and forget and to take back Constance as a sister. And I appreciate it
all the more...."

Mrs. van Lowe said this in a tone of approval, but a little
autocratically, as though she granted her children a right to their own
opinion but yet thought it only natural that they should obey their
mother's wish. And she and Dorine watched the servants putting out the
card-tables: one in the big drawing-room, one in the second drawing-room
and one in the boudoir. It was the sacred Sunday, the evening of the
"family-group," as the grandchildren naughtily called it among
themselves. Every Sunday, Mamma collected as many Van Lowes, Ruyvenaers,
Van Naghels and Saetzemas as she could, minding the name less than
whether they were relations, even though they were only relations of
relations. It was all brother and sister, uncle and aunt, cousin and
cousin. Years ago, the Van Lowes--Papa, the retired governor-general,
and Mamma--had instituted that Sunday gathering of the members of the
family who happened to be at the Hague; and they had all, as far as
possible, kept themselves free on Sunday evenings to come to the
"family-group." This very regularity bore witness to the close bonds
connecting the several families, Uncle Ruyvenaer could not remember
missing a single Sunday evening, except when he ran over to Java, on a
six months' return-ticket, to see how the sugar-factory was going on.

The Ruyvenaers were first, as usual, arriving very early and at once
filling the rooms. Uncle, with a shiver, abused the Dutch climate: he
was tall and stout, wearisome with his noisy attempts at humour, full of
a su