als.

"Here's your tea, Hendrik."

The old man drank his cup of tea.

Then the old woman also took her book and read....

Slowly, in the course of years, she had read her Bible less and less,
because she was wicked after all and because she had never resigned
herself to the sacrifice which she had made, which it was her duty to
make, before God and man. Then she chanced on a wonderful book which
described what happened to people after death. And this book she read
every evening.

But she was unable to read, this evening. As a rule, the old pair read,
over their cup of tea, till ten o'clock, in silence, and then got up and
went to bed. But the old woman could not read this evening. Her aching
feet fidgeted on the stool, her bent body moved in vague discomfort. And
she asked, still casually, nervously:

"Will Henri be thirty-_nine_ to-morrow, Hendrik?"

"Yes."

She knew quite well that he would be thirty-nine, but she wanted to say
it again, wanted to talk of her son. For fifteen long years, she had not
seen him; and his birthdays, the anniversaries of the day on which she
had borne him, her only child, had passed while he was very far away,
too far for her to reach him and take him in her arms. For many years,
she had hoped:

"Now it will come, now it will come nearer."

But it had not come nearer. Until suddenly it was very near, until
suddenly it was there. Now it was here, after long, long years; and yet
it was not here, it was far away....

She could not read, got up, went out of the room, across the hall. The
old man stared after her, went on reading. And it was as though her
disquiet kept increasing, as though a voice--one of those voices of
which she had read in that strange book--said to her:

"Go, go to-morrow!"

Never had a voice spoken so plainly to her, the old woman, and as it
were ordered her to go, to go to-morrow. She was very old, in years, in
movement and in feeling; and she never, never travelled. She lived
quietly in her house beside the country-road, summer and winter alike;
and sometimes she went for a little drive in the neighbourhood: Beyond
that she no longer went, for she was gouty and full of aches and pains
which bent her withered back. For years and years, she had not
travelled, had not sat in the train which, for years, she had heard
whistling at the station, sometimes even heard rumbling. And now the
mysterious voice so plainly and insistently commanded:

"Go!"

Then sh