"I thought you were keen to visit the Dead Cities of the Zuider Zee," said I.
She stared at me as blankly as if she had not been prophesying my doom a little while ago.
"What's that got to do with Monnikendam?" she demanded.
"Only that Monnikendam is one of the Dead Cities; your first," I explained; but she cried incredulously——
"Monnikendam a Dead City of the Zuider Zee? Say it isn't true."
"I'm afraid it is."
"Oh, then I am disappointed! I thought we should come to the Dead Cities along the shore of the sea. That we'd see grass-grown streets lined with empty houses fallen half to pieces, and that perhaps if the water were clear we could look down, down, and spy steeples and ruined castles glimmering at the bottom. Won't some be like that?"
"Not one," I said. "They won't be any deader than Monnikendam, which was once the playground of merchant princes. I thought it was dead enough."
"Not to please me," she answered, with the air of a Madame Defarge in blue spectacles.
The Mariner came up before we had got into open sea. For the moment the three ladies were occupied in watching Tibe, who had fallen asleep in his cape, and was running with all his feet in some wild dream, flickering in every muscle, and wrinkling his black mug into alarming grimaces.