the whole long, hot day, with its frown of care, with its invisible population of people looking towards the future: a future of money, a future perhaps even more of rest, in Europe. And she longed to get away. Batavia suffocated her, notwithstanding her daily drive round the spacious Koningsplein. She had only one wish left, a melancholy wish: to say good-bye to Van Oudijck. Her peculiar temperament, that of a smart, artistic woman, had, very strangely, appreciated and felt the fascination of his character, that of a simple, practical man. She had perhaps, only for a moment, felt something for him, deep down within herself, a friendship which formed a sort of contrast with her friendship for Van Helderen, an appreciation of his fine human qualities rather than a feeling of Platonic community of souls. She had felt a sympathetic pity for him in those strange, mysterious days, for the man living alone in his enormous house, with the strange happenings creeping in upon him. She had felt intensely sorry for him when his wife, kicking aside her exalted position, had gone away in an insolent mood, arousing a storm of scandal, nobody knew exactly why: his wife, at one time always so correct in her demeanour, notwithstanding all her depravity, but gradually devoured by the canker of the strange happenings until she was no longer able to restrain herself, baring the innermost secrets of her profligate soul with cynical indifference. The red betel-slaver, spat as it were by ghosts on her naked body, had affected her like a sickness, had eaten into the marrow of her bones, like a disintegration of her soul, of which she might perhaps die, slowly wasting away. What people now said of her, of her mode of life in Paris, represented something so unutterably depraved that it was not to be mentioned above a whisper. Eva heard about it at Batavia, amid the gossip at the evening-parties. And, when she asked after Van Oudijck--where he was staying, whether he would soon be going to Europe, after his unexpected resignation, a thing that had surprised the whole official world--they were unable to tell her, they asked one another if he was no longer at the Hôtel Wisse, where he had been seen only a few weeks ago, lying on his chair in his little verandah, with his legs on the rests, staring fixedly before him without moving a limb. He had hardly gone out at all, taking his meals in his room and not at the table-d'hôte, as though he--the man who had always been accustomed to dealing with hundreds of people--had became shy of meeting his fellow-creatures. And at last Eva heard that Van Oudijck was living at Bandong. As she had to pay some farewell visits, she went to the Preanger. But he was not to be found at Bandong: all that the hotel-proprietor was able to tell her was that Van Oudijck had stayed a few days at his place, but had since gone, he did not know whither.