Mijnheer had a good deal to say to Julia, principally about his business.  The letters she had written for him during the illness of the clerk who usually did his English correspondence, had given her some little insight into it.  This she had profited by, being in the first instance really interested, and, in the second, not slow to see that the old man, far from resenting it, had been pleased.  He talked a good deal about his affairs now, giving her little bits of information and explaining rather proudly his method of doing business, and his father’s and his grandfather’s before him.  Joost, as usual, said little or nothing; he must have been five or six and twenty, but he had hardly ever left the parental roof, and was usually so hard at work that he had little time or inclination for frivolity.  He had earnest child-like blue eyes that Julia did not care to look at, any more than she did the round yellow face of Mr. Gillat’s watch.  This was rather a pity as she could not always avoid it, and certainly he looked at her a good deal, in fact whenever he thought he was not observed.  Of course he always was observed, by her at least; that was a foregone conclusion; the observation gave her some uneasiness.

After dinner the father and son went to sit on the veranda, and Mevrouw helped Julia take the dishes into the white marble kitchen and the glasses into the little off-room.  Later, Julia came to sit on the veranda, too—­it was somewhat stuffy being all closed in with glass windows.  There they drank pale tea, the pot kept simmering on a spirit-stove, and read the foreign papers which had just come.  Mevrouw did not read, she made tea and did crochet work, a strip like Vrouw Snieder’s, only yellow instead of red.  Julia, it is to be feared, did not try to master the pattern so kindly set right by Denah; she could not resist the breath from the outside world which the papers brought.

At six o’clock Mijnheer and his son went back to the office, and Julia, having washed the tea-cups, joined Mevrouw in the sitting-room.  It was never very light in that room, for the walls were covered with a crimson flock paper and the woodwork was black; while the windows, which looked on the canal, were always shaded till dark.  They sat here at work on the morning gown, till supper time.  Mijnheer sometimes came in an hour before supper, as early as half-past eight; Joost had usually too much to do to come in before half-past nine.  After supper, when the things were cleared away, they had prayers; Mijnheer read a chapter from the Bible, and they sat round the table and listened, and afterwards he said, “Now we will pray,” and they sat a while in silence.  Julia sat, too, her keen, observing eyes cast down and a curious stillness about her.  After that every one went to bed; Julia and the maidservant had two little rooms right up in the eaves of the house; the family slept on the floor below.  Julia was glad of this, though it was possible to imagine