“Je, jevrouw,” said Yanke, disappearing again, followed by Truide and her children.
Then Koosje sat down again, and began to think.
“I said,” she mused, presently, “that night that the next time I fell over a bundle I’d leave it where I found it. Ah, well! I’m not a barbarian; I couldn’t do that. I never thought, though, it would be Truide.”
“Hi, jevrouw,” was called from the inner room.
“Je, mynheer,” jumping up and going to her customers.
She attended to their wants, and presently bowed them out.
“I never thought it would be Truide,” she repeated to herself, as she closed the door behind the last of the gay uniforms and jingling scabbards. “And Jan is dead—ah, well!”
Then she went into the kitchen, where the miserable children—girls both of them, and pretty had they been clean and less forlornly clad—were playing about the stove.
“So Jan is dead,” began Koosje, seating herself.
“Yes, Jan is dead,” Truide answered.