week, and keep you all, good _and_ bad. No! give up waiting for the shoes that will maybe walk behind your coffin; for this shop and this house shall never be yourn. Gerard is our heir: poor Gerard whom you have banished and done your best to kill; after that never call me mother again! But you have made him tenfold dearer to me. My poor lost boy! I shall soon see him again; shall hold him in my arms, and set him on my knees. Ay, you may stare! You are too crafty, and yet not crafty enow. You cut the stalk away; but you left the seed--the seed that shall outgrow you, and outlive you. Margaret Brandt is quick, and it is Gerard's, and what is Gerard's is mine; and I have prayed the saints it may be a boy: and it will--it must. Kate, when I found it was so, my bowels yearned over her child unborn as if it had been my own. He is our heir. He will outlive us. You will not: for a bad heart in a carcass is like the worm in a nut, soon brings the body to dust. So, Kate, take down Gerard's bib and tucker that are in the drawer you wot of, and one of these days we will carry them to Sevenbergen. We will borrow Peter Buyskens' cart, and go comfort Gerard's wife under her burden. She is his wife. Who is Ghysbrecht Van Swieten? Can he come between a couple and the altar, and sunder those that God and the priest make one? She is my daughter, and I am as proud of her as I am of you, Kate, almost; and as for _you_, keep out of my way awhile: for you are like the black dog in my eyes." Cornelis and Sybrandt took the hint and slunk out, aching with remorse, and impenitence, and hate. They avoided her eye as much as ever they could: and for many days she never spoke a word good, bad, or indifferent, to either of them. Liberaverat animum suum. CHAPTER XLVII CATHERINE was a good housewife who seldom left home for a day, and then one thing or another always went amiss. She was keenly conscious of this, and, watching for a slack tide in things domestic, put off her visit to Sevenbergen from day to day, and one afternoon that it really could have been managed Peter Buyskens' mule was out of the way. At last, one day Eli asked her before all the family, whether it was true she had thought of visiting Margaret Brandt. "Ay, my man." "Then I do forbid you." "Oh, do you?" "I do." "Then there is no more to be said, I suppose," said she, colouring. "Not a word," replied Eli, sternly. When she was alone with her daughter she was very severe, not upon Eli, but upon herself.