They were poor
people. His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a
little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the side of a
sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two
hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the
homely stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending
their wares to the distant Indies, had lived in them calm and
prosperous lives, and in their decent decay they kept still an
aroma of their splendid past. You could wander along the
canal till you came to broad green fields, with windmills here
and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed lazily.
I thought that among those surroundings, with their
recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his
unhappiness. But he would not go.
"I must be here when she needs me," he repeated. "It would be
dreadful if something terrible happened and I were not at hand."
"What do you think is going to happen?" I asked.
"I don't know. But I'm afraid."
I shrugged my shoulders.
For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridiculous object.
He might have excited sympathy if he had grown worn and thin.
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