Note 23 — Chapter XVII · [CONTINUATION OF STERN’S COMPOSITION.]

Therefore he walked on, though less rapidly than the first day. He had the ‘melatti’ in his hand, and often pressed it to his breast. He had become much older during the last three days, and he no longer understood how he had lived so calmly before, when Adinda was so near him, and he could see her as often as he liked. But now he could not be calm, when he expected that he should see her again by and by. Nor did he understand why he after having taken leave had not returned once more to look at her again. And he even remembered how a short time ago he had quarrelled with her about the cord which she had made for the lalayang23 of her brother, and which had broken because there was a defect in her work by which a wager had been lost against the children of Tjipoeroet. “How was it possible,” he thought, “to have been angry about that with Adinda? For if there was a defect in the cord, and if the wager of Badoer against Tjipoeroet had been lost in consequence, and not by the piece of glass which little Djamien had thrown while hiding himself behind the pagger,24 ought I then to have been so rough to her, and called her by unseemly names? What if I die at Batavia without having asked her pardon for such harshness? Will it not make me appear as if I were a bad man, who scolds a girl? And when it is heard that I have died in a foreign country, will not every one at Badoer say, ‘It is good that Saïdjah died; for he had an insolent mouth against Adinda?’ ”