and intimated that it must be disgraceful indeed for a person, pretending to be a lady-help, to be thankful to accept the situation of cook.  Julia’s answer was scarcely polite, and very well calculated to rouse the old woman further, and, at the same time, she opened the door and skilfully worked herself and her antagonist into the passage, and some way up it, raising her voice so as to incite the other to raise hers.  The result was that soon the noise reached Herr Van de Greutz.

Out he came in a great rage, ordering them about their business, and abusing them roundly.  Marthe hurried back to the kitchen, effectually silenced, but Julia remained; she had not got her dismissal yet, and it was imperative she should get it, for there was no telling when the ground rice would be discovered.  But she soon got what she wanted; after a very little more inciting, Herr Van de Greutz ordered her out of his house a great deal more peremptorily than she had been ordered out of the Van Heigens’.  She was to go at once; she was to pack her things and go, and Marthe was to see that she took nothing but what was her own; she was the most untrustworthy and incompetent pig that the devil ever sent to spoil good food, and steal silver spoons.

To this Julia replied by asking for her wages.  At first Van de Greutz refused; but Julia, with some effrontery, considering the circumstances, declined to go without them, so eventually he thought better of it and paid her.  After that she and Marthe went up-stairs, and she packed and Marthe looked on, closely scrutinising everything.  When all was done, and she herself dressed, she walked out of the house, with the formula fastened inside her cuff, and the explosive balanced on her head.  And the old man who did the rough work about the place came with her, wheeling her luggage on a barrow as far as the gate.  Here he shot it out, and left her to wait till she might hail some passing cart, and so get herself conveyed to the town.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HEIRESS

There was a fog on the river and while the tide was low no craft moved; but with its rising there came a stir of life, the mist that crept low on the brown water became articulate with syren voices and the thud of screws and the wash of water churned by belated boats.  The steamers called eerily, out of the distance a heart-broken cry like no other thing on earth, suddenly near at hand a hoot terrific; but nothing was to be seen except rarely when out of the yellow impenetrableness a hull rose abruptly, a vague dark mass almost within touching distance.  Julia stood on deck and listened while the little Dutch boat crept up; she found something fascinating in this strange, shrouded river, haunted, like a stream of the nether world, with lamentable bodiless voices.  The fog had delayed them, of course; the afternoon was now far advanced; they had been compelled to wait