h.

"Not used to the job," reasoned Dick. "And no skivvy in the house _this_
week." And he remembered the garden hat with the orange band.

Half-way back she set down her load, straightened her back, and glanced
at the upper part of the house.

The sight of the partly-opened window and the white figure now drawn
back a little into the room seemed to fill her with rage. She ran
forward and, standing a few yards from the house, shook her fists
furiously, pouring out a stream of abuse and threats of which hardly an
articulate word reached Dick's ears. Having come to a climax with a
shriek, hoarsely suppressed, she ran back to the bucket and with it
stumbled quickly into the house.

Dick was over the wall almost before she was out of sight; but
clattering of coal-shovel and fire-grate told him she had not yet
started on her way upstairs, and he followed with extreme caution.

The door which stuck out into the yard soon hid him from the open
doorway, and enabled him to bring his eyes above the sill of the window,
which must be passed to reach the house, without fear of attack from
behind.

In the scullery, at the end further from the main building, was a small
hobbed grate. By this the woman with the flaxen hair had set her coals,
and was now lighting a fire, of which the paper was flaming high and the
wood began already to crackle.

In this commonplace task she seemed so unnaturally absorbed that Dick
watched her with intense curiosity, his head held horizontally, so that
one eye only topped the lower edge of the window-sill, thus making the
least possible exposure of his head above it.

Every now and then she would turn and pick out with her fingers little
lumps of coal and drop them in the hottest crevices among the sticks;
and each time he saw a face of cruelty more determined.

He thought of Amaryllis, and knew that it was of Amaryllis that this
little Dutch devil also was thinking.

"Melchard's!" he thought; and knew that for him, Dick Bellamy, she must
be, in what was coming, not a woman but a tiger or a bad man.

The fire now glowed under its blaze. She took a shovel and strewed a
thin layer of small coal over all. Next she spread a doubled sheet of
newspaper on the stone floor, and laid on it small sticks and again
small coal.

Several times during this fire-lighting Dick had seen her glance, as she
turned, at a small mound of stuff which lay on the further side of the
hearth. She now lifted it, holdi