"Do you pay her much ... for allowing us to meet here?" "Oh, what does it matter?" "Listen," she said again, more attentively. "That's not Mrs. van Does." "No." "It's a man's footstep.... It wasn't a dog-cart either: it was much too noisy." "I expect it's nothing," said she. "Some one who has mistaken the house. Nobody ever comes here." "The man's going round," he said, listening. They both listened for a moment. And then, suddenly, after two or three strides through the cramped little garden and along the little back-verandah, his figure, Van Oudijck's, appeared outside the closed glass door, visible through the curtain. And he had pulled it open before Léonie and Addie could change their position, so that Van Oudijck saw them both, her sitting on the couch and him kneeling before her, while her hand still lay, as though forgotten, on his hair. "Léonie!" roared her husband. Her blood under the shock of the surprise broke into stormy waves and seethed through her veins and, in one second, she saw the whole future: his anger, the trial, the divorce, her alimony, all in one whirling vision. But, as though by the compulsion of her nervous will, the tide of blood within her at once subsided and grew calm; and she remained quietly sitting there, her terror showing for but a moment longer in her eyes, until she could turn them hard as steel upon Van Oudijck. And, by pressing her finger softly on Addie's head, she suggested to him also to remain in the same attitude, to remain kneeling at her feet, and she said, as though self-hypnotized, listening in astonishment to her own slightly husky voice: "Otto ... Adrien de Luce is asking me to put in a word with you for him.... He is asking ... for Doddie's hand...." They all three remained motionless, all three under the influence of these words, of this thought which had come ... whence Léonie herself did not know. For, sitting rigid and erect as a sibyl and still with that gentle pressure on Addie's head, she repeated: "He is asking ... for Doddie's hand...." She was still the only one to speak. And she continued: "He knows that you have certain objections. He knows that you do not care for his family ... because they have Javanese blood in their arteries." She was still speaking as though some one else were speaking inside her; and she had to smile at that word arteries, she did not know why: perhaps because it was the first time in her life that she had used the word arteries, for veins, in conversation. "But," she went on, "there are no financial drawbacks, if Doddie likes to live at Patjaram.... And the children have been fond of each other ... so long." She alone was speaking still: "Doddie has so long been overstrung, almost ill.... It would be a crime, Otto, not to consent."