She was a good girl, deeply in love with her handsome husband, to
whom she bore a son and heir in the first year of their marriage.
Not many moons thereafter the pleased but restless father slid back
into his old rounds again. The forest waned and the debts waxed.
Rumors of wild doings came from Spa and Aix, from Homburg and
Baden, from Trouville and Ostend. After four years of this the young
mother died, of no namable disease, unless you call it heart-failure,
and the boy was left to his grandmother's care and company among
the trees.
Every day when it was fair the old lady and the little lad took
their afternoon walk together in the beech-tree avenue, where the
tips of the branches now reached the road. At other times he roamed
the outlying woods and learned to know the birds and the little
wild animals. When he was twelve his grandmother died. After that
he was left mainly to the housekeeper, his tutors, and the few
friends he could make among the children of the neighborhood.
When he had finished his third year at the University of Louvain
and attained his majority, his father returned express-haste from
somewhere in Bohemia, to attend the coronation of Leopold II,
that remarkable King of Belgium and the Bourse.
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