But if they were no longer young, and such good looks as they ever possessed had vanished, the years had brought them certain compensations.  Indeed, it was a period in which spies and all such wretches flourished, since, besides other pickings, by special enactment a good proportion of the realized estates of heretics was paid over to the informers as blood-money.  Of course, however, humble tools like the Butcher and his wife did not get the largest joints of the heretic sheep, for whenever one was slaughtered, there were always many honest middlemen of various degree to be satisfied, from the judge down to the executioner, with others who never showed their faces.

Still, when the burnings and torturings were brisk, the amount totalled up very handsomely.  Thus, as the pair sat at their meal this morning, they were engaged in figuring out what they might expect to receive from the estate of the late Heer Jansen, or at least Black Meg was so employed with the help of a deal board and a bit of chalk.  At last she announced the result, which was satisfactory.  Simon held up his fat hands in admiration.

“Clever little dove,” he said, “you ought to have been a lawyer’s wife with your head for figures.  Ah! it grows near, it grows near.”

“What grows near, you fool?” asked Meg in her deep mannish voice.

“That farm with an inn attached of which I dream, standing in rich pasture land with a little wood behind it, and in the wood a church.  Not too large; no, I am not ambitious; let us say a hundred acres, enough to keep thirty or forty cows, which you would milk while I marketed the butter and the cheeses——­”

“And slit the throats of the guests,” interpolated Meg.

Simon looked shocked.  “No, wife, you misjudge me.  It is a rough world, and we must take queer cuts to fortune, but once I get there, respectability for me and a seat in the village church, provided, of course, that it is orthodox.  I know that you come of the people, and your instincts are of the people, but I can never forget that my grandfather was a gentleman,” and Simon puffed himself out and looked at the ceiling.

“Indeed,” sneered Meg, “and what was your grandmother, or, for the matter of that, how do you know who was your grandfather?  Country house!  The old Red Mill, where you hide goods out there in the swamp, is likely to be your only country house.  Village church?  Village gallows more likely.  No, don’t you look nasty at me, for I won’t stand it, you dirty little liar.  I have done things, I know; but I wouldn’t have got my own aunt burned for an Anabaptist, which she wasn’t, in order to earn twenty florins, so there.”

Simon turned purple with rage; that aunt story was one which touched him on the raw.  “Ugly——­” he began.

Instantly Meg’s hand shot out and grasped the neck of a bottle, whereon he changed his tune.

“The sex, the sex!” he murmured, turning aside to mop his bald head with a napkin; “well, it’s only their pretty way, they will have their little joke.  Hullo, there is someone knocking at the door.”