“You must try and gather together the threads again. Why don’t you go down to Italy and start working?” Again he made no reply, but the driver of our carriage came to my rescue. Slackening his pace for a moment, he leaned over and spoke. I could not hear what he said, so I put my head out of the window. He wanted to know where we wished to be set down. I told him to wait a minute. “You’d better come and have lunch with me,” I said to Dirk. “I’ll tell him to drop us in the Place Pigalle.” “I’d rather not. I want to go to the studio.” I hesitated a moment. “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked then. “No; I should prefer to be alone.” “All right.” I gave the driver the necessary direction, and in renewed silence we drove on. Dirk had not been to the studio since the wretched morning on which they had taken Blanche to the hospital. I was glad he did not want me to accompany him, and when I left him at the door I walked away with relief. I took a new pleasure in the streets of Paris, and I looked with smiling eyes at the people who hurried to and fro. The day was fine and sunny, and I felt in myself a more acute delight in life. I could not help it; I put Stroeve and his sorrows out of my mind. I wanted to enjoy. Chapter XXXVIII I did not see him again for nearly a week. Then he fetched me soon after seven one evening and took me out to dinner. He was dressed in the deepest mourning, and on his bowler was a broad black band. He had even a black border to his handkerchief. His garb of woe suggested that he had lost in one catastrophe every relation he had in the world, even to cousins by marriage twice removed. His plumpness and his red, fat cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous. It was cruel that his extreme unhappiness should have in it something of buffoonery. He told me he had made up his mind to go away, though not to Italy, as I had suggested, but to Holland. “I’m starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we shall ever meet.” I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly. “I haven’t been home for five years. I think I’d forgotten it all; I seemed to have come so far away from my father’s house that I was shy at the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel it’s my only refuge.”