ooks 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; b