As a rule, she spent her Wednesday afternoons with Klomp, the lazy proprietor of the tumble-down cottage in Horstwyk wood. Klomp was what she chose to call “a sort of a distant connection of hers,” he being disreputable, and a cousin-german. This disreputable man she had, however, made up her mind to marry, for her chances were infinitesimal, and she felt that the tidying him up would be a glory and a joy.
As she now went zigzagging along the road, crooked in feature and movement, through the sloppy haze of dull-brown bareness, she came across a shy urchin who was gathering forbidden firewood. Him she immediately accosted, like the Bumble she was.
“Do you know, you boy, who comes for children that steal?”
“Jesus,” stammered the frightened culprit, giving the invariable answer of all Dutch children to any question that savors of the Sunday-school.
“The Devil! The Devil! The Devil!” reiterated Hephzibah, with impressive vociferation. “Do you understand me? The Devil.” She attempted, ignoring physical impossibilities, to fix both her eyes in one soul-searching stare. But the little boy lifted his own pale-blue orbs in saucer-sized reproach.
“It’s very wrong to swear,” he said, gravely.
So Hephzibah continued her way, for “Answer not a fool,” she reflected, “according to his folly.” She saw, through the gaunt glitter of the trees, Klomp’s half-detached shutters hanging forlorn. She wondered who had opened them on this usually deserted side. Certainly not Klomp. She smiled grimly. She would put things to rights, as was her custom, and scold him.
She heard voices inside the house, an unknown woman’s voice, and laughter--actually laughter from Klomp, whose utmost exertion in her presence hardly attained to a smile. She pushed open the door and entered, indignant. Some chipped crockery was spread over the crippled table, and behind an odorous paraffine-stove and coffee-pot sat a frowzy female of spurious pretensions to elegance--a female with whom Hephzibah was not acquainted, but whose name was Adeline Skiff. The virtuous Abigail immediately wrote down the stranger “a bad lot,” and less virtue would have sufficed thus correctly to apprise her.
[Illustration: “‘DO YOU KNOW, YOU BOY, WHO COMES FOR CHILDREN THAT STEAL?’”]