Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her paternally.  His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a good-night kiss.  She closed the door, and went away from it to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort of laugh, without buoyancy.

“Flushed!  A little flushed!” she repeated to herself.  “I hope so, indeed!  A little—­”

Her eyelashes were wet.  Antonia, in her corner, moaned and giggled, and it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and the giggles began.

The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya, on fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her everything.

“I have avenged you, my girl,” she exclaimed.

And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with admonitions—­“Ssh, not so loud!  Be quiet!” on one part, and interludes of “I am so frightened. . . .  He’s an evil man,” on the other.

Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk.  She was afraid of him because of his personal appearance:  because of his eyes and his eyebrows, and his mouth and his nose and his limbs.  Nothing could be more rational.  And she thought him an evil man, because, to her eyes, he looked evil.  No ground for an opinion could be sounder.  In the dimness of the room, with only a nightlight burning at the head of Freya’s bed, the camerista crept out of her corner to crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in whispers: 

“There’s the brig.  Captain Allen.  Let us run away at once—­oh, let us run away!  I am so frightened.  Let us!  Let us!”

“I!  Run away!” thought Freya to herself, without looking down at the scared girl.  “Never.”

Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the frightened maid lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did not sleep very well that night.  The person that did not sleep at all was Lieutenant Heemskirk.  He lay on his back staring vindictively in the darkness.  Inflaming images and humiliating reflections succeeded each other in his mind, keeping up, augmenting his anger.  A pretty tale this to get about!  But it must not be allowed to get about.  The outrage had to be swallowed in silence.  A pretty affair!  Fooled, led on, and struck by the girl—­and probably fooled by the father, too.  But no.  Nielsen was but another victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that sly, laughing, kissing, lying . . .

“No; he did not deceive me on purpose,” thought the tormented lieutenant.  “But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for being such an imbecile—­”

Well, some day, perhaps.  One thing he was firmly resolved on:  he had made up his mind to steal early out of the house.  He did not think he could face the girl without going out of his mind with fury.

“Fire and perdition!  Ten thousand devils!  I shall choke here before the morning!” he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his back on old Nelson’s bed, his breast heaving for air.