"He never loved me," said Priscilla, wistfully. On thinking it over she was not quite sure that she liked being allowed to run away so easily. Did nobody care, then, what became of her? Was she of positively no value at all? Running away is all very well, but your pride demands that those runned from shall at least show some sign of not liking it, make some effort, however humble, to fetch you back. If they do not, if they remain perfectly quiescent and resigned, not even sending forth a wail that shall be audible, you are naturally extremely crushed. "My father," said Priscilla bitterly, "doesn't care a bit. He'll give out I'm dangerously ill, and then you'll see, Fritzi—I shall either die, or be sent away for an interminable yachting cruise with the Countess. And so dust will be thrown in people's eyes. My father is very good at that, and the Countess is a perfect genius. You'll see."

But Fritzing never saw, for there was no more mention at all either of Kunitz or of influenza. And just then he was so much taken up by his efforts to get into the cottages as quickly as possible that after a passing feeling of thankfulness that the Grand Duke should be of such a convenient indifference to his daughter's fate it dropped from his mind in the easy fashion in which matters of importance always did drop from it. What was the use, briefly reflected this philosopher, of worrying about what they were or were not thinking at Kunitz? There would be time enough for that when they actually began to do something. He felt very safe from Kunitz in the folds of the Somerset hills, and as the days passed calmly by he felt still safer. But though no dangers seemed to threaten from without there were certain dangers within that made it most desirable for them to get away from Baker's and into their own little home without a moment's unnecessary delay. He could not always be watching his tongue, and he found for instance that it positively refused to call the Princess Ethel. It had an almost equal objection to addressing her as niece; and it had a most fatal habit of slipping out Grand Ducal Highnesses. True, at first they mostly talked German together, but the tendency to talk English grew more marked every day; it was in the air they breathed, and they both could talk it so fatally well. Up at the cottages among the workmen, or when they were joined by Mr. Dawson, grown zealous to help, or by either of the young men Robin and Tussie, who seemed constantly to be passing, the danger too was great. Fritzing was so conscious of it that he used to break out into perspirations whenever Priscilla was with him in public, and his very perspirations were conspicuous. The strain made his manner oddly nervous when speaking to or of his niece, and he became the subject of much conjecture to the observant Robin. Robin thought that in spite of her caressing ways with her uncle the girl must be privately a dreadful tyrant. It seemed difficult to believe, but Robin prided himself on being ready to believe anything at a moment's notice, especially if it was the worst, and he called it having an open mind. The girl was obviously the most spoilt of girls. No one could help seeing that. Her least wish seemed to be for the uncle a command that was not even to be talked about. Yet the uncle was never openly affectionate to her. It almost seemed as though she must have some secret hold over him, be in possession, perhaps, of some fact connected with a guilty past. But then this girl and guilty pasts! Why, from the look in her eyes she could never even have heard of such things. Robin thought himself fairly experienced in knowledge of human nature, but he had to admit that he had never yet met so incomprehensible a pair. He wanted to talk to Tussie Shuttleworth about them, but Tussie would not talk. To Tussie it seemed impossible to talk about Priscilla because she was sacred to him, and she was sacred to him because he adored her so. He adored her to an extent that amazes me to think of, worshipping her beauty with all the headlong self-abasement of a very young man who is also a poet. His soul was as wax within him, softest wax punched all over with little pictures of Priscilla. No mother is happy while her child's soul is in this state, and though he was extremely decent, and hid it and smothered it and choked it with all the energy he possessed, Lady Shuttleworth knew very well what was going on inside him and spent her spare time trying to decide whether to laugh or to cry over her poor Tussie. "When does Robin go back to Cambridge?" she asked Mrs. Morrison the next time she met her, which was in the front garden of a sick old woman's cottage.

Mrs. Morrison was going in with a leaflet; Lady Shuttleworth was going in with a pound of tea. From this place they could see Priscilla's cottage, and Robin was nailing up its creepers in the sight of all Symford.

"Ah—I know what you mean," said Mrs. Morrison quickly.

"It is always such a pity to see emotions wasted," said Lady Shuttleworth slowly, as if weighing each word.

"Wasted? You do think she's an adventuress, then?" said Mrs. Morrison eagerly.

"Sh-sh. My dear, how could I think anything so unkind? But we who are old"—Mrs. Morrison jerked up her chin—"and can look on calmly, do see the pity of it when beautiful emotions are lavished and wasted. So much force, so much time frittered away in dreams. And all so useless, so barren. Nothing I think is so sad as waste, and nothing is so wasteful as a one-sided love."

Mrs. Morrison gave the pink tulle bow she liked to wear in the afternoons at her throat an agitated pat, and tried to conceal her misery that Augustus Shuttleworth should also have succumbed to Miss Neumann-Schultz. That he had done so was very clear from Lady Shuttleworth's portentous remarks, for it was not in human nature for a woman to be thus solemn about the wasted emotions of other people's sons. His doing so might save Robin's future, but it would ruin Netta's. We all have our little plans for the future—dear rosy things that we dote on and hug to our bosoms with more tenderness even than we hug the babies of our bodies, and the very rosiest and best developed of Mrs. Morrison's darling plans was the marriage of her daughter Netta with the rich young man Augustus. It was receiving a rude knock on its hopeful little head at this moment in old Mrs. Jones's front garden, and naturally the author of its being winced. Augustus, she feared, must be extremely far gone in love, and it was not likely that the girl would let such a chance go. It was a consolation that the marriage would be a scandal,—this person from nowhere, this niece of a German teacher, carrying off the wealthiest young man in the county. The ways of so-called Providence were quite criminally inscrutable, she thought, in stark defiance of what a vicar's wife should think; but then she was greatly goaded.

Priscilla herself came out of Mrs. Jones's door at that moment with a very happy face. She had succeeded in comforting the sick woman to an extent that surprised her. The sick woman had cheered up so suddenly and so much that Priscilla, delighted, had at once concluded that work among the sick poor was her true vocation. And how easy it had been! A few smiles, a few kind words, a five-pound note put gently into the withered old hands, and behold the thing was done. Never was sick woman so much comforted as Mrs. Jones. She who had been disinclined to speak above a whisper when Priscilla went in was able at the end of the visit to pour forth conversation in streams, and quite loud conversation, and even interspersed with chuckles. All Friday Priscilla had tried to help in the arranging of her cottage, and had made herself and Fritzing so tired over it that on Saturday she let him go up alone and decided that she would, for her part, now begin to do good to the people in the village. It was what she intended to do in future. It was to be the chief work of her new life. She was going to live like the poor and among them, smooth away their sorrows and increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary facts of life. And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the farm. It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead that sillinesses assailed her soul—shrinkings of the flesh from honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience at Annalise's swollen eyes. Priscilla could have cried that night when she went to bed, if she had not held tears in scorn, at the sickliness of her spirit, her spirit that she had thought more than able to keep her body in subjection, that she had hoped was unalterably firm and brave. But see the uses of foolishness,—the reaction from it is so great that it sends us with a bound twice as far again along the right road as we were while we were wise and picking our way with clean shoes slowly among the puddles. Who does not know that fresh impulse, so strong and gracious, towards good that surges up in us after a period of sitting still in mud? What an experience it is, that vigorous shake and eager turning of our soiled face once more towards the blessed light. "I will arise and go to my Father"—of all the experiences of the spirit surely this is the most glorious; and behold the prudent, the virtuous, the steadfast—dogged workers in the vineyard in the heat of the day—are shut out from it for ever.

Priscilla had not backslided much; but short as her tarrying had been among the puddles she too sprang forward after it with renewed strength along the path she had chosen as the best, and having completed the second of her good works—the first had been performed just previously, and had been a warm invitation made personally from door to door to all the Symford mothers to send their children to tea and games at Baker's Farm the next day, which was Sunday—she came away very happy from the comforted Mrs. Jones, and met the two arriving comforters in the front garden.

Now Priscilla's and Mrs. Jones's last words together had been these:

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" Priscilla had asked, leaning over the old lady and patting her arm in farewell.

"No, deary—you've done enough already, God bless your pretty face," said Mrs. Jones, squeezing the five-pound note ecstatically in her hands.

"But isn't there anything you'd like? Can't I get you anything? See, I can run about and you are here in bed. Tell me what I can do."

Mrs. Jones blinked and worked her mouth and blinked again and wheezed and cleared her throat. "Well, I do know of something would comfort me," she said at last, amid much embarrassed coughing.

"Tell me," said Priscilla.

"I don't like," coughed Mrs. Jones.

"Tell me," said Priscilla.

"I'll whisper it, deary."

Priscilla bent down her head, and the old lady put her twitching mouth to her ear.

"Why, of course," said Priscilla smiling, "I'll go and get you some at once."

"Now God for ever bless your beautiful face, darlin'!" shrilled Mrs. Jones, quite beside herself with delight. "The Cock and 'Ens, deary—that's the place. And the quart bottles are the best; one gets more comfort out of them, and they're the cheapest in the end."

And Priscilla issuing forth on this errand met the arriving visitors in the garden.

"How do you do," she said in a happy voice, smiling gaily at both of them. She had seen neither since she had dismissed them, but naturally she had never given that strange proceeding a thought.

"Oh—how do you do," said Lady Shuttleworth, surprised to see her there, and with a slight and very unusual confusion of manner.

Mrs. Morrison said nothing but stood stiffly in the background, answering Priscilla's smile with a stern, reluctant nod.

"I've been talking to poor old Mrs. Jones. Your son"—she looked at Mrs. Morrison—"told me how ill she was."

"Did he?" said Mrs. Morrison, hardly raising her eyes a moment from the ground. This girl was her double enemy: bound, whatever she did, to make either a fool of her son or of her daughter.

"So I went in and tried to cheer her up. And I really believe I did."

"Well that was very kind of you," said Lady Shuttleworth, smiling in spite of herself, unable to withstand the charm of Priscilla's personality. How supremely ridiculous of Mrs. Morrison to think that this girl was an adventuress. Such are the depths of ignorance one can descend to if one is buried long enough in the country.

"Now," said Priscilla cheerfully, "she wants rum, and I'm just going to buy her some."

"Rum?" cried Lady Shuttleworth in a voice of horror; and Mrs. Morrison started violently.

"Is it bad for her?" said Priscilla, surprised.

"Bad!" cried Lady Shuttleworth.

"It is," said Mrs. Morrison with her eyes on the ground, "poison for both body and soul."

"Dear me," said Priscilla, her face falling. "Why, she said it would comfort her."

"It will poison both her body and her soul," repeated Mrs. Morrison grimly.

"My dear," said Lady Shuttleworth, "our efforts are all directed towards training our people to keep from drinking."

"But she doesn't want to drink," said Priscilla. "She only wants to taste it now and then. I'm afraid she's dying. Mustn't she die happy?"

"It is our duty," said Mrs. Morrison, "to see that our parishioners die sober."

"But I've promised," said Priscilla.

"Did she—did she ask for it herself?" asked Lady Shuttleworth, a great anxiety in her voice.

"Yes, and I promised."

Both the women looked very grave. Mrs. Jones, who was extremely old and certainly dying—not from any special disease but from mere inability to go on living—had been up to this a shining example to Symford of the manner in which Christian old ladies ought to die. As such she was continually quoted by the vicar's wife, and Lady Shuttleworth had felt an honest pride in this ordered and seemly death-bed. The vicar went every day and sat with her and said that he came away refreshed. Mrs. Morrison read her all those of her leaflets that described the enthusiasm with which other good persons behave in a like case. Lady Shuttleworth never drove through the village without taking her some pleasant gift—tea, or fruit, or eggs, or even little pots of jam, to be eaten discreetly and in spoonfuls. She also paid a woman to look in at short intervals during the day and shake up her pillow. Kindness and attention and even affection could not, it will be admitted, go further; all three had been heaped on Mrs. Jones with generous hands; and in return she had expressed no sentiments that were not appropriate, and never, never had breathed the faintest suggestion to any of her benefactors that what she really wanted most was rum. It shocked both the women inexpressibly, and positively pained Lady Shuttleworth. Mrs. Morrison privately believed Priscilla had put the idea into the old lady's head, and began to regard her in something of the light of a fiend.

"Suppose," said Priscilla, "we look upon it as medicine."

"But my dear, it is not medicine," said Lady Shuttleworth.

"It is poison," repeated Mrs. Morrison.

"How can it be if it does her so much good? I must keep my promise. I wouldn't disappoint her for the world. If only you'd seen her delight"—they quivered—"you'd agree that she mustn't be disappointed, poor old dying thing. Why, it might kill her. But suppose we treat it as a medicine, and I lock up the bottle and go round and give her a little myself three or four times a day—wouldn't that be a good plan? Surely it couldn't hurt?"

"There is no law to stop you," said Mrs. Morrison; and Lady Shuttleworth stared at the girl in silent dismay.

"I can try it at least," said Priscilla; "and if I find it's really doing her harm I'll leave off. But I promised, and she's expecting it now every minute. I can't break my promise. Do tell me—is the Cock and Hens that inn round the corner? She told me it was best there."

"But you cannot go yourself to the Cock and Hens and buy rum," exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth, roused to energy; and her voice was full of so determined a protest that the vicar's wife, who thought it didn't matter at all where such a young woman went, received a fresh shock.

"Why not?" inquired Priscilla.

"My dear, sooner than you should do that I'll—I'll go and buy it myself," cried Lady Shuttleworth.

"Gracious heavens," thought Mrs. Morrison, perfectly staggered by this speech. Had Lady Shuttleworth suddenly lost her reason? Or was she already accepting the girl as her son's wife? Priscilla looked at her a moment with grave eyes. "Is it because I'm a girl that I mustn't?" she asked.

"Yes. For one thing. But—" Lady Shuttleworth shut her mouth.

"But what?" asked Priscilla.

"Oh, nothing."

"If it's not the custom of the country for a girl to go I'll send Mr. Morrison," said Priscilla.

"Send Mr. Morrison?" gasped the vicar's wife.

"What, the vicar?" exclaimed Lady Shuttleworth.

"No, no," said Priscilla smiling, "young Mr. Morrison. I see him over there tying up my creepers. He's so kind. He'll go. I'll ask him."

And nodding good-bye she hurried out of the garden and over to her cottage, almost running in her desire not to keep Mrs. Jones any longer in suspense.

The two women, rooted to the ground, watched her as if fascinated, saw her speak to Robin on his ladder, saw how he started and dropped his nails, saw how nimbly he clambered down, and how after the shortest parley the infatuated youth rushed away at once in the direction of the Cock and Hens. The only thing they did not see from where they stood was the twinkle in his eye.

"I don't think," murmured Lady Shuttleworth, "I don't think, my dear, that I quite care to go in to Mrs. Jones to-day. I—I think I'll go home."

"So shall I," said Mrs. Morrison, biting her lips to keep them steady. "I shall go and speak to the vicar."



XI

What she meant by speaking to the vicar was a vigorous stirring of him up to wrath; but you cannot stir up vicars if they are truly good. The vicar was a pious and patient old man, practiced in forgiveness, in overlooking, in waiting, in trying again. Always slow to anger, as the years drew him more and more apart into the shadows of old age and he watched from their clear coolness with an ever larger comprehension the younger generations striving together in the heat, he grew at last unable to be angered at all. The scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down upon your wrath had no uses for him, for he possessed no wrath for the sun to go down upon. He had that lovable nature that sees the best in everything first, and then prefers to look no further. He took for granted that people were at bottom good and noble, and the assumption went a long way towards making them so. Robin, for instance, was probably saved by his father's unclouded faith in him. Mrs. Morrison, a woman who had much trouble with herself, having come into the world with the wings of the angel in her well glued down and prevented from spreading by a multitude of little defects, had been helped without her knowing it by his example out of many a pit of peevishness and passion. Who shall measure the influence of one kind and blameless life? His wife, in her gustier moments, thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil, this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle. The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of one's self to go on being calm in the face of it. With the blindness of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness of the object—the same remark exactly applies to husbands—she did not see that the vicar was the candle shining in a naughty world, that he was the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. And just as leaven leavens by its mere presence in the lump, by merely passively being there, and will go on doing it so long as there is a lump to leaven, so had the vicar, more than his hardworking wife, more than the untiring Lady Shuttleworth, more than any district visitor, parish nurse, or other holy person, influenced Symford by simply living in it in a way that would have surprised him had he known. There is a great virtue in sweeping out one's own house and trimming its lamps before starting on the house and lamps of a neighbour; and since new dust settles every day, and lamps, I believe, need constant trimming, I know not when the truly tidy soul will have attained so perfect a spotlessness as to justify its issuing forth to attack the private dust of other people. And if it ever did, lo, it would find the necessity no longer there. Its bright untiringness would unconsciously have done its work, and every dimmer soul within sight of that cheerful shining been strengthened and inspired to go and do likewise.

But Mrs. Morrison, who saw things differently, was constantly trying to stir up storms in the calm waters of the vicar's mind; and after the episode in Mrs. Jones's front garden she made a very determined effort to get him to rebuke Priscilla. Her own indignation was poured out passionately. The vicar was surprised at her heat, he who was so beautifully cool himself, and though he shook his head over Mrs. Jones's rum he also smiled as he shook it. Nor was he more reasonable about Robin. On the contrary, he declared that he would think mightily little of a young man who did not immediately fall head over ears in love with such a pretty girl.

"You don't mind our boy's heart being broken, then?" questioned his wife bitterly; of her plans for Netta she had never cared to speak.

"My dear, if it is to be broken there is no young lady I would sooner entrust with the job."

"You don't mind his marrying an adventuress, then?"

"My dear, I know of no adventuress."

"You rather like our old people to be tempted to drink, to have it thrust upon them on their very dying beds?"

"Kate, are you not bitter?"

"Psha," said his wife, drumming her foot.

"Psha, Kate?" inquired the vicar mildly; and it is not always that the saintly produce a soothing effect on their wives.

It really seemed as if the girl were to have her own way in Symford, unchecked even by Lady Shuttleworth, whose attitude was entirely incomprehensible. She was to be allowed to corrupt the little hamlet that had always been so good, to lead it astray, to lure it down paths of forbidden indulgence, to turn it topsy turvy to an extent not even reached by the Dissenting family that had given so much trouble a few years before. It was on the Sunday morning as the church bells were ringing, that Mrs. Morrison, prayer-book in hand, looked in at Mrs. Jones's on her way to service and discovered the five-pound note.

The old lady was propped up in bed with her open Bible on her lap and her spectacles lying in it, and as usual presented to her visitor the perfect realization of her ideal as to the looks and manners most appropriate to ailing Christians. There was nowhere a trace of rum, and the only glass in the room was innocently filled with the china roses that flowered so profusely in the garden at Baker's Farm. But Mrs. Morrison could not for all that dissemble the disappointment and sternness of her heart, and the old lady glanced up at her as she came in with a kind of quavering fearfulness, like that of a little child who is afraid it may be going to be whipped, or of a conscientious dog who has lapsed unaccountably from rectitude.

"I have come to read the gospel for the day to you," said Mrs. Morrison, sitting down firmly beside her.

"Thank you mum," said Mrs. Jones with meekness.

"My prayer-book has such small print—give me your Bible."

A look of great anxiety came into Mrs. Jones's eyes, but the Bible was drawn from between her trembling old hands, and Mrs. Morrison began to turn its pages. She had not turned many before she came to the five-pound note. "What is this?" she asked, in extreme surprise.

Mrs. Jones gave a little gasp, and twisted her fingers about.

"A five-pound note?" exclaimed Mrs. Morrison, holding it up. "How did it come here?"

"It's mine, mum," quavered Mrs. Jones.

"Yours? Do you mean to say you have money hidden away and yet allow Lady Shuttleworth to pay everything for you?"

"It's the first I ever 'ad, mum," faintly murmured the old lady, her eyes following every movement of Mrs. Morrison's hands with a look of almost animal anxiety.

"Where did it come from?"

"The young lady give it me yesterday, mum."

"The young lady?" Mrs. Morrison's voice grew very loud. "Do you mean the person staying at the Pearces'?"

Mrs. Jones gulped, and feebly nodded.

"Most improper. Most wrong. Most dangerous. You cannot tell how she came by it, and I must say I'm surprised at you, Mrs. Jones. It probably is not a real one. It is unlikely a chit like that should be able to give so large a sum away—" And Mrs. Morrison held up the note to the light and turned it round and round, scrutinizing it from every point of view, upside down, back to front, sideways, with one eye shut; but it refused to look like anything but a good five-pound note, and she could only repeat grimly "Most dangerous."

The old lady watched her, a terrible anxiety in her eyes. Her worst fears were fulfilled when the vicar's wife folded it up and said decidedly, "For the present I shall take care of it for you. You cannot lie here with so much money loose about the place. Why, if it got round the village you might have some one in who'd murder you. People have been murdered before now for less than this. I shall speak to the vicar about it." And she put it in her purse, shut it with a snap, and took up the Bible again.

Mrs. Jones made a little sound between a gasp and a sob. Her head rolled back on the pillow, and two tears dropped helplessly down the furrows of her face. In that moment she felt the whole crushing misery of being weak, and sick, and old,—so old that you have outlived your claims to everything but the despotic care of charitable ladies, so old that you are a mere hurdy-gurdy, expected each time any one in search of edification chooses to turn your handle to quaver out tunes of immortality. It is a bad thing to be very old. Of all the bad things life forces upon us as we pass along it is the last and worst—the bitterness at the bottom of the cup, the dregs of what for many was after all always only medicine. Mrs. Jones had just enough of the strength of fear left to keep quite still while the vicar's wife read the Gospel in a voice that anger made harsh; but when she had gone, after a parting admonition and a dreadful assurance that she would come again soon, the tears rolled unchecked and piteous, and it was a mercy that Priscilla also took it into her head to look in on her way to church, for if she had not I don't know who would have dried them for this poor baby of eighty-five. And I regret to say that Priscilla's ideas of doing good were in such a state of crudeness that she had no sooner mastered the facts brokenly sobbed out than she ran to the cupboard and gave Mrs. Jones a tablespoonful of rum for the strengthening of her body and then took out her purse and gave her another five-pound note for the comforting of her soul. And then she wiped her eyes, and patted her, and begged her not to mind. Such conduct was, I suppose, what is called indiscriminate charity and therefore blameworthy, but its effect was great. Priscilla went to church with the reflection of the old lady's wonder and joy shining in her own face. "Hide it," had been her last words at the door, her finger on her lips, her head nodding expressively in the direction of the vicarage; and by this advice she ranged herself once and for all on the opposite side to Mrs. Morrison and the followers of obedience and order. Mrs. Jones would certainly have taken her for an angel working miracles with five-pound notes and an inexhaustible pocket if it had not been for the rum; even in her rapture she did feel that a genuine angel would be incapable of any really harmonious combination with rum. But so far had she fallen from the kind of thinking that the vicar's wife thought proper in a person so near her end that she boldly told herself she preferred Priscilla.

Now this was the day of Priscilla's children's party, and though all Symford had been talking of it for twenty-four hours the news of it had not yet reached Mrs. Morrison's ears. The reason was that Symford talked in whispers, only too sure that the authorities would consider it wrong for it to send its children a-merrymaking on a Sunday, and desperately afraid lest the forbidden cup should be snatched from its longing lips. But the news did get to Mrs. Morrison's ears, and it got to them in the porch of the church as she was passing in to prayer. She had it from an overgrown girl who was waiting outside for her father, and who was really much too big for children's parties but had got an invitation by looking wistful at the right moment.

"Emma," said Mrs. Morrison in passing, "you have not returned the book I lent you. Bring it up this afternoon."

"Please mum, I'll bring it to-morrow, mum," said the girl, curtseying and turning red.

"No, Emma, you will do as I direct. One can never be too particular about returning books. You have kept it an unconscionable time. You will bring it to the vicarage at four o'clock."

"Please mum, I—I can't at four o'clock."

"And pray, Emma, what is to prevent you?"

"I—I'm going to Baker's, mum."

"Going to Baker's? Why are you going to Baker's, Emma?"

So it all came out.

The bells were just stopping, and Mrs. Morrison, who played the organ, was forced to hurry in without having told Emma her whole opinion of those who gave and those who attended Sunday parties, but the prelude she played that day expressed the tumult of her mind very well, and struck Tussie Shuttleworth, who had sensitive ears, quite cold. He was the only person in the church acutely sensitive to sound, and it was very afflicting to him, this plunging among the pedals, this angry shrieking of stops no man ever yet had heard together. The very blower seemed frightened, and blew in gasps; and the startled Tussie, comparing the sounds to the clamourings of a fiend in pain, could not possibly guess they were merely the musical expression of the state of a just woman's soul.

Mrs. Morrison's anger was perfectly proper. It had been the conscientious endeavour of twenty-five solid years of her life to make of Symford a model parish, and working under Lady Shuttleworth, whose power was great since all the cottages were her son's and were lived in by his own labourers, it had been kept in a state of order so nearly perfect as to raise it to the position of an example to the adjoining parishes. The church was full, the Sunday-school well attended, the Sabbath was kept holy, the women were one and all sober and thrifty, the men were fairly satisfactory except on Saturday nights, there was no want, little sickness, and very seldom downright sin. The expression downright sin is Mrs. Morrison's own,—heaven forbid that I should have anything to do with such an expression—and I suppose she meant by it thieving, murder, and other grossnesses that would bring the sinner, as she often told her awe-struck Dorcas class, to infallible gallows, and the sinner's parents' grey hairs to sorrowful graves. "Please mum, will the parents go too?" asked a girl one day who had listened breathlessly, an inquiring-minded girl who liked to get to the root of things.

"Go where, Bessie?"

"With the grey hairs, mum."

Mrs. Morrison paused a moment and fixed a searching gaze on Bessie's face. Then she said with much dignity, "The parents, Bessie, will naturally follow the hairs." And to a girl bred in the near neighbourhood of Exmoor it sounded very sporting.

Into this innocent, frugal, well-managed hamlet Priscilla dropped suddenly from nowhere, trailing with her thunder-clouds of impulsive and childish ideas about doing good, and holding in her hands the dangerous weapon of wealth. It is hard to stand by and see one's life-work broken up before one's eyes by an irresponsible stranger, a foreigner, a girl, a young girl, a pretty girl; especially hard if one was born with an unbending character, tough and determined, ambitious and vain. These are not reproaches being piled up on the vicar's wife; who shall dare reproach another? And how could she help being born so? We would all if we could be born good and amiable and beautiful, and remain so perpetually during our lives; and she too was one of God's children, and inside her soul, behind the crust of failings that hindered it during these years from coming out, sat her bright angel, waiting. Meanwhile she was not a person to watch the destruction of her hopes without making violent efforts to stop it; and immediately she had played the vicar into the vestry after service that Sunday she left the congregation organless and hurried away into the churchyard. There she stood and waited for the villagers to question them about this unheard of thing; and it was bad to see how they melted away in other directions,—out at unused gates, making detours over the grass, visiting the long-neglected graves of relatives, anywhere rather than along the ordinary way, which was the path where the vicar's wife stood. At last came Mrs. Vickerton the postmistress. She was deep in conversation with the innkeeper's wife, and did not see the figure on the path in time to melt away herself. If she had she certainly would have melted, for though she had no children but her grown-up son she felt very guilty; for it was her son who had been sent the afternoon before to Minehead by Priscilla with a list as long as his arm of the cakes and things to be ordered for the party. "Oh Mrs. Morrison, I didn't see you," she exclaimed, starting and smiling and turning red. She was a genteel woman who called no one mum.

The innkeeper's wife slipped deftly away among graves.

"Is it true that the children are going to Baker's Farm this afternoon?" asked Mrs. Morrison, turning and walking grimly by Mrs. Vickerton.

"I did hear something about it, Mrs. Morrison," said Mrs. Vickerton, hiding her agitation behind a series of smiles with sudden endings.

"All?"

"I did hear they pretty well all thought of it," said Mrs. Vickerton, coughing. "Beautiful weather, isn't it, Mrs. Morrison."

"They are to have tea there?"

Mrs. Vickerton gazed pleasantly at the clouds and the tree-tops. "I should think there might be tea, Mrs. Morrison," she said; and the vision of that mighty list of cakes rising before her eyes made her put up her hand and cough again.

"Have the parents lost their senses?"

"I couldn't say—I really couldn't say, Mrs. Morrison."

"Have they forgotten the commandments?"

"Oh I 'ope not, Mrs. Morrison."

"And the vicar's teaching? And the good habits of years?"

"Oh, Mrs. Morrison."

"I never heard of anything more disgraceful. Disgraceful to the giver and to those who accept. Wicked, scandalous, and unscriptural."

"We all 'oped you'd see no harm in it, Mrs. Morrison. It's a fine day, and they'll just have tea, and perhaps—sing a little, and they don't get treats often this time of year."

"Why, it's disgraceful—disgraceful anywhere to have a treat on a Sunday; but in a parish like this it is scandalous. When Lady Shuttleworth hears of it I quite expect she'll give everybody notice to quit."

"Notice to quit? Oh I hope not, Mrs. Morrison. And she do know about it. She heard it last night. And Sir Augustus himself has promised the young lady to go and help."

"Sir Augustus?"

"And we all think it so kind of him, and so kind of the young lady too," said Mrs. Vickerton, gathering courage.

"Sir Augustus?" repeated Mrs. Morrison. Then a horrid presentiment laid cold fingers on her heart. "Is any one else going to help?" she asked quickly.

"Only the young lady's uncle, and—"

Mrs. Vickerton hesitated, and looked at the vicar's wife with a slightly puzzled air.

"And who?"

"Of course Mr. Robin."



XII

It is the practice of Providence often to ignore the claims of poetic justice. Properly, the Symford children ought to have been choked by Priscilla's cakes; and if they had been, the parents who had sent them merrymaking on a Sunday would have been well punished by the undeniable awfulness of possessing choked children. But nobody was choked; and when in the early days of the following week there were in nearly every cottage pangs being assuaged, they were so naturally the consequence of the strange things that had been eaten that only Mrs. Morrison was able to see in them weapons being wielded by Providence in the cause of eternal right. She, however, saw it so plainly that each time during the next few days that a worried mother came and asked advice, she left her work or her meals without a murmur, and went to the castor-oil cupboard with an alacrity that was almost cheerful; and seldom, I suppose, have such big doses been supplied and administered as the ones she prescribed for suffering Symford.

But on this dark side of the picture I do not care to look; the party, anyhow, had been a great success, and Priscilla became at one stroke as popular among the poor of Symford as she had been in Lothen-Kunitz. Its success it is true was chiefly owing to the immense variety of things to eat she had provided; for the conjuror, merry-go-round, and cocoa-nuts to be shied at that she had told young Vickerton to bring with him from Minehead, had all been abandoned on Tussie's earnest advice, who instructed her innocent German mind that these amusements, undoubtedly admirable in themselves and on week days, were looked upon askance in England on Sundays.

"Why?" asked Priscilla, in great surprise.

"It's not keeping the day holy," said Tussie, blushing.

"How funny," said Priscilla.

"Oh, I don't know."

"Why," said Priscilla, "in Kun—" but she pulled herself up just as she was about to give him a description of the varied nature of Sunday afternoons in Kunitz.

"You must have noticed," said Tussie, "as you have lived so long in London, that everything's shut on Sundays. There are no theatres and things—certainly no cocoa-nuts."

"No, I don't remember any cocoa-nuts," mused Priscilla, her memory going over those past Sundays she had spent in England.

Tussie tried to make amends for having obstructed her plans by exerting himself to the utmost to entertain the children as far as decorum allowed. He encouraged them to sing, he who felt every ugliness in sound like a blow; he urged them to recite for prizes of sixpences, he on whose soul Casabianca and Excelsior had much the effect of scourges on a tender skin; he led them out into a field between tea and supper and made them run races, himself setting the example, he who caught cold so easily that he knew it probably meant a week in bed. Robin helped too, but his exertions were confined to the near neighbourhood of Priscilla. His mother had been very angry with him, and he had been very angry with his mother for being angry, and he had come away from the vicarage with a bad taste in his mouth and a great defiance in his heart. It was the first time he had said hard things to her, and it had been a shocking moment,—a moment sometimes inevitable in the lives of parents and children of strong character and opposed desires. He had found himself quite unable in his anger to clothe his hard sayings in forms of speech that would have hidden their brutal force, and he had turned his back at last on her answering bitterness and fled to Baker's, thankful to find when he got there that Priscilla's beauty and the interest of the mystery that hung about her wiped out every other remembrance.

Priscilla was in the big farm kitchen, looking on at the children having tea. That was all she did at her party, except go round every now and then saying pleasant little things to each child; but this going round was done in so accomplished a manner, she seemed so used to it, was so well provided with an apparently endless supply of appropriate remarks, was so kind, and yet so—what was the word? could it be mechanical?—that Robin for the hundredth time found himself pondering over something odd, half-remembered, elusive about the girl. Then there was the uncle; manifestly a man who had never before been required to assist at a school-treat, manifestly on this occasion an unhappy man, yet look how he worked while she sat idly watching, look how he laboured round with cakes and bread-and-butter, clumsily, strenuously, with all the heat and anxiety of one eager to please and obey. Yes, that was what he did; Robin had hit on it at last. This extraordinary uncle obeyed his niece; and Robin knew very well that Germany was the last country in the world to produce men who did that. Had he not a cousin who had married a German officer? A whilom gay and sprightly cousin, who spent her time, as she dolefully wrote, having her mind weeded of its green growth of little opinions and gravelled and rolled and stamped with the opinions of her male relations-in-law. "And I'd rather have weeds than gravel," she wrote at the beginning of this process when she was still restive under the roller, "for they at least are green." But long ago she had left off complaining, long ago she too had entered into the rest that remaineth for him who has given up, who has become what men praise as reasonable and gods deplore as dull, who is tired of bothering, tired of trying, tired of everything but sleep. Then there was the girl's maid. This was the first time Robin had seen her; and while she was helping Mrs. Pearce pour out cups of chocolate and put a heaped spoonful of whipped cream on the top of each cup in the fashion familiar to Germans and altogether lovely in the eyes of the children of Symford, Robin went to her and offered help.

Annalise looked at him with heavy eyes, and shook her head.

"She don't speak no English, sir," explained Mrs. Pearce. "This one's pure heathen."

"No English," echoed Annalise drearily, who had at least learned that much, "no English, no English."

Robin gathered up his crumbs of German and presented them to her with a smile. Immediately on hearing her own tongue she flared into life, and whipping out a little pocket-book and pencil asked him eagerly where she was.

"Where you are?" repeated Robin, astonished.

"Ja, Ja. The address. This address. What is it? Where am I?"

"What, don't you know?"

"Tell me—quick," begged Annalise.

"But why—I don't understand. You must know you are in England?"

"England! Naturally I know it is England. But this—where is it? What is its address? For letters to reach me? Quick—tell me quick!"

Robin, however, would not be quick. "Why has no one told you?" he asked, with an immense curiosity.

"Ach, I have not been told. I know nothing. I am kept in the dark like—like a prisoner." And Annalise dragged her handkerchief out of her pocket, and put it to her eyes just in time to stop her ready tears from falling into the whipped cream and spoiling it.

"There she goes again," sniffed Mrs. Pearce. "It's cry, cry, from morning till night, and nothing good enough for her. It's a mercy she goes out of this to-morrow. I never see such an image."

"Tell me," implored Annalise, "tell me quick, before my mistress—"

"I'll write it for you," said Robin, taking the note-book from her. "You know you go into a cottage next week, so I'll put your new address." And he wrote it in a large round hand and gave it to her quickly, for Mrs. Pearce was listening to all this German and watching him write with a look that made him feel cheap. So cheap did it make him feel that he resisted for the present his desire to go on questioning Annalise, and putting his hands in his pockets sauntered away to the other end of the kitchen where Priscilla sat looking on. "I'm afraid that really was cheap of me," he thought ruefully, when he came once more into Priscilla's sweet presence; but he comforted himself with the reflection that no girl ought to be mysterious, and if this one chose to be so it was fair to cross her plans occasionally. Yet he went on feeling cheap; and when Tussie who was hurrying along with a cup of chocolate in each hand ran into him and spilt some on his sleeve the sudden rage with which he said "Confound you, Tussie," had little to do with the hot stuff soaking through to his skin and a great deal with the conviction that Tussie, despised from their common childhood for his weakness, smallness and ugliness, would never have done what he had just done and betrayed what the girl had chosen to keep secret from her maid.

"But why secret? Why? Why?" asked Robin, torn with desire to find out all about Priscilla.

"I'm going to do this often," said Priscilla, looking up at him with a pleased smile. "I never saw such easily amused little creatures. Don't you think it is beautiful, to give poor people a few happy moments sometimes?"

"Very beautiful," said Robin, his eyes on her face.

"It is what I mean to do in future," she said dreamily, her chin on her hand.

"It will be expensive," remarked Robin; for there were nearly two hundred children, and Priscilla had collected the strangest things in food on the long tables as a result of her method, when inviting, of asking each mother what her child best liked to eat and then ordering it with the lavishness of ignorance from Minehead.

"Oh, we shall live so simply ourselves that there will be enough left to do all I want. And it will be the most blessed change and refreshment, living simply. Fritzi hated the fuss and luxury quite as much as I did."

"Did he?" said Robin, holding his breath. The girl was evidently off her guard. He had not heard her call her uncle baldly Fritzi before; and what fuss and luxury could a German teacher's life have known?

"He it was who first made me see that the body is more than meat and the soul than raiment," mused Priscilla.

"Was he?"

"He pulled my soul out of the flesh-pots. I'm a sort of Israel come out of Egypt, but an Egypt that was altogether too comfortable."

"Too comfortable? Can one be too comfortable?"

"I was. I couldn't move or see or breathe for comfort. It was like a feather bed all over me."

"I wouldn't call that comfort," said Robin, for she paused, and he was afraid she was not going on. "It sounds much more like torture."

"So it was at last. And Fritzi helped me to shake it off. If he hadn't I'd have smothered slowly, and perhaps if I'd never known him I'd have done it as gracefully as my sisters did. Why, they don't know to this day that they are dead."

Robin was silent. He was afraid to speak lest anything he said should remind her of the part she ought to be playing. He had no doubt now at all that she was keeping a secret. A hundred questions were burning on his lips. He hated himself for wanting to ask them, for being so inquisitive, for taking advantage of the girl's being off her guard, but what are you to do with your inherited failings? Robin's mother was inquisitive and it had got into his blood, and I know of no moral magnesia that will purify these things away. "You said the other day," he burst out at last, quite unable to stop himself, "that you only had your uncle in the world. Are your sisters—are they in London?"

"In London?" Priscilla gazed at him a moment with a vague surprise. Then fright flashed into her eyes. "Did I not tell you they were dead? Smothered?" she said, getting up quickly, her face setting into the frown that had so chilled Tussie on the heath.

"But I took that as a parable."

"How can I help how you took it?"

And she instantly left him and went away round the tables, beginning those little pleasant observations to the children again that struck him as so strange.

Well did he know the sort of thing. He had seen Lady Shuttleworth do it fifty times to the tenants, to the cottagers, at flower-shows, bazaars, on all occasions of public hospitality or ceremony; but practised and old as Lady Shuttleworth was this girl seemed yet more practised. She was a finished artist in the work, he said to himself as he leaned against the wall, his handsome face flushed, his eyes sulky, watching her. It was enough to make any good-looking young man sulky, the mixture of mystery and aloofness about Miss Neumann-Schultz. Extraordinary as it seemed, up to this point he had found it quite impossible to indulge with her in that form of more or less illustrated dialogue known to Symford youths and maidens as billing and cooing. Very fain would Robin have billed and have cooed. It was a practice he excelled in. And yet though he had devoted himself for three whole days, stood on ladders, nailed up creepers, bought and carried rum, had a horrible scene with his mother because of her, he had not got an inch nearer things personal and cosy. Miss Neumann-Schultz thanked him quite kindly and graciously for his pains—oh, she was very gracious; gracious in the sort of way Lady Shuttleworth used to be when he came home for the holidays and she patted his head and uttered benignities—and having thanked, apparently forgot him till the next time she wanted anything.

"Fritzi," said Priscilla, when in the course of her progress down the room she met that burdened man, "I'm dreadfully afraid I've said some foolish things."

Fritzing put the plate of cake he was carrying down on a dresser and wiped his forehead. "Ma'am," he said looking worried, "I cannot watch you and administer food to these barbarians simultaneously. If your tongue is so unruly I would recommend complete silence."

"I've said something about my sisters."

"Sisters, ma'am?" said Fritzing anxiously.

"Does it matter?"

"Matter? I have carefully instructed the woman Pearce, who has certainly informed, as I intended she should inform, the entire village, that you were my brother's only child. Consequently, ma'am, you have no sisters."

Priscilla made a gesture of despair. "How fearfully difficult it is not to be straightforward," she said.

"Yes, ma'am, it is. Since we started on this adventure the whole race of rogues has become the object of my sincerest admiration. What wits, what quickness, what gifts—so varied and so deftly used—what skill in deception, what resourcefulness in danger, what self-command—"

"Yes but Fritzi what are we to do?"

"Do, ma'am? About your royal sisters? Would to heaven I had been born a rogue!"

"Yes, but as you were not—ought I to go back and say they're only half-sisters? Or step-sisters? Or sisters in law? Wouldn't that do?"

"With whom were you speaking?"

"Mr. Morrison."

"Ma'am, let me beg you to be more prudent with that youth than with any one. Our young friend Caesar Augustus is I believe harmlessness itself compared with him. Be on your guard, ma'am. Curb that fatal feminine appendage, your tongue. I have remarked that he watches us. But a short time since I saw him eagerly conversing with your Grand Ducal Highness's maid. For me he has already laid several traps that I have only just escaped falling into by an extraordinary presence of mind and a nimbleness in dialectic almost worthy of a born rogue."

"Oh Fritzi," said the frightened Priscilla, laying her hand on his sleeve, "do go and tell him I didn't mean what I said."

Fritzing wiped his brow again. "I fail to understand," he said, looking at Priscilla with worried eyes, "what there is about us that can possibly attract any one's attention."

"Why, there isn't anything," said Priscilla, with conviction. "We've been most careful and clever. But just now—I don't know why—I began to think aloud."

"Think aloud?" exclaimed Fritzing, horrified. "Oh ma'am let me beseech you never again to do that. Better a thousand times not to think at all. What was it that your Grand Ducal Highness thought aloud?"

And Priscilla, shamefaced, told him as well as she could remember.

"I will endeavour to remedy it," said poor Fritzing, running an agitated hand through his hair.

Priscilla sighed, and stood drooping and penitent by the dresser while he went down the room to where Robin still leaned against the wall.

"Sir," said Fritzing—he never called Robin young man, as he did Tussie—"my niece tells me you are unable to distinguish truth from parable."

"What?" said Robin staring.

"You are not, sir, to suppose that when my niece described her sisters as dead that they are not really so."

"All right sir," said Robin, his eyes beginning to twinkle.

"The only portion of the story in which my niece used allegory was when she described them as having been smothered. These young ladies, sir, died in the ordinary way, in their beds."

"Feather beds, sir?" asked Robin briskly.

"Sir, I have not inquired into the nature of the beds," said Fritzing with severity.

"Is it not rather unusual," asked Robin, "for two young ladies in one family to die at once? Were they unhealthy young ladies?"

"Sir, they did not die at once, nor were they unhealthy. They were perfectly healthy until they—until they began to die."

"Indeed," said Robin, with an interest properly tinged with regret. "At least, sir," he added politely, after a pause in which he and Fritzing stared very hard at each other, "I trust I may be permitted to express my sympathy."

"Sir, you may." And bowing stiffly Fritzing returned to Priscilla, and with a sigh of relief informed her that he had made things right again.

"Dear Fritzi," said Priscilla looking at him with love and admiration, "how clever you are."



XIII

It was on the Tuesday, the day Priscilla and Fritzing left Baker's and moved into Creeper Cottage, that the fickle goddess who had let them nestle for more than a week beneath her wing got tired of them and shook them out. Perhaps she was vexed by their clumsiness at pretending, perhaps she thought she had done more than enough for them, perhaps she was an epicure in words and did not like a cottage called Creeper; anyhow she shook them out. And if they had had eyes to see they would not have walked into their new home with such sighs of satisfaction and such a comfortable feeling that now at last the era of systematic serenity and self-realization, beautifully combined with the daily exercise of charity, had begun; for waiting for them in Priscilla's parlour, established indeed in her easy-chair by the fire and warming her miserable toes on the very hob, sat grey Ill Luck horribly squinting.

Creeper Cottage, it will be remembered, consisted of two cottages, each with two rooms, an attic, and a kitchen, and in the back yard the further accommodation of a coal-hole, a pig-stye, and a pump. Thanks to Tussie's efforts more furniture had been got from Minehead. Tussie had gone in himself, after a skilful questioning of Fritzing had made him realize how little had been ordered, and had, with Fritzing's permission, put the whole thing into the hands of a Minehead firm. Thus there was a bed for Annalise and sheets for everybody, and the place was as decent as it could be made in the time. It was so tiny that it got done, after a great deal of urging from Tussie, by the Tuesday at midday, and Tussie himself had superintended the storing of wood in the coal-hole and the lighting of the fire that was to warm his divine lady and that Ill Luck found so comforting to her toes. The Shuttleworth horses had a busy time on the Friday, Saturday, and Monday, trotting up and down between Symford and Minehead; and the Shuttleworth servants and tenants, not being more blind than other people, saw very well that their Augustus had lost his heart to the lady from nowhere. As for Lady Shuttleworth, she only smiled a rueful smile and stroked her poor Tussie's hair in silence when, having murmured something about the horses being tired, he reproved her by telling her that it was everybody's duty to do what they could for strangers in difficulties.

Priscilla's side of Creeper Cottage was the end abutting on the churchyard, and her parlour had one latticed window looking south down the village street, and one looking west opening directly on to the churchyard. The long grass of the churchyard, its dandelions and daisies, grew right up beneath this window to her wall, and a tall tombstone half-blocked her view of the elm-trees and the church. Over this room, with the same romantic and gloomy outlook, was her bedroom. Behind her parlour was what had been the shoemaker's kitchen, but it had been turned into a temporary bathroom. True no water was laid on as yet, but the pump was just outside, and nobody thought there would be any difficulty about filling the bath every morning by means of the pump combined with buckets. Over the bathroom was the attic. This was Annalise's bedroom. Nobody thought there would be any difficulty about that either; nobody, in fact, thought anything about anything. It was a simple place, after the manner of attics, with a window in its sloping ceiling through which stars might be studied with great comfort as one lay in bed. A frugal mind, an earnest soul, would have liked the attic, would have found a healthy enjoyment in a place so plain and fresh, so swept in windy weather by the airs of heaven. A poet, too, would certainly have flooded any parts of it that seemed dark with the splendour of his own inner light; a nature-lover, again, would have quickly discovered the spiders that dwelt in its corners, and spent profitable hours on all fours observing them. But an Annalise—what was she to make of such a place? Is it not true that the less a person has inside him of culture and imagination the more he wants outside him of the upholstery of life? I think it is true; and if it is, then the vacancy of Annalise's mind may be measured by the fact that what she demanded of life in return for the negative services of not crying and wringing her hands was nothing less filled with food and sofas and servants than a grand ducal palace.

But neither Priscilla nor Fritzing knew anything of Annalise's mind, and if they had they would instantly have forgotten it again, of such extreme unimportance would it have seemed. Nor would I dwell on it myself if it were not that its very vacancy and smallness was the cause of huge upheavals in Creeper Cottage, and the stone that the builders ignored if they did not actually reject behaved as such stones sometimes do and came down upon the builders' heads and crushed them. Annalise, you see, was unable to appreciate peace, yet on the other hand she was very able to destroy the peace of other people; and Priscilla meant her cottage to be so peaceful—a temple, a holy place, within whose quiet walls sacred years were going to be spent in doing justly, in loving mercy, in walking humbly. True she had not as yet made a nearer acquaintance with its inconveniences, but anyhow she held the theory that inconveniences were things to be laughed at and somehow circumvented, and that they do not enter into the consideration of persons whose thoughts are absorbed by the burning desire to live out their ideals. "You can be happy in any place whatever," she remarked to Tussie on the Monday, when he was expressing fears as to her future comfort; "absolutely any place will do—a tub, a dingle, the top of a pillar—any place at all, if only your soul is on fire."

"Of course you can," cried Tussie, ready to kiss her feet.

"And look how comfortable my cottage seems," said Priscilla, "directly one compares it with things like tubs."

"Yes, yes," agreed Tussie, "I do see that it's enough for free spirits to live in. I was only wondering whether—whether bodies would find it enough."

"Oh bother bodies," said Priscilla airily.

But Tussie could not bring himself to bother bodies if they included her own; on the contrary, the infatuated young man thought it would be difficult sufficiently to cherish a thing so supremely precious and sweet. And each time he went home after having been in the frugal baldness of Creeper Cottage he hated the superfluities of his own house more and more, he accused himself louder and louder of being mean-spirited, effeminate, soft, vulgar, he loathed himself for living embedded in such luxury while she, the dear and lovely one, was ready cheerfully to pack her beauty into a tub if needs be, or let it be weather-beaten on a pillar for thirty years if by so doing she could save her soul alive. Tussie at this time became unable to see a sleek servant dart to help him take off his coat without saying something sharp to him, could not sit through a meal without making bitter comparisons between what they were eating and what the poor were probably eating, could not walk up his spacious staircase and along his lofty corridors without scowling; they, indeed, roused his contemptuous wrath in quite a special degree, the reason being that Priscilla's stairs, the stairs up and down which her little feet would have to clamber daily, were like a ladder, and she possessed no passages at all. But what of that? Priscilla could not see that it mattered, when Tussie drew her attention to it.

Both Fritzing's and her front door opened straight into their sitting-rooms; both their staircases walked straight from the kitchens up into the rooms above. They had meant to have a door knocked in the dividing wall downstairs, but had been so anxious to get away from Baker's that there was no time. In order therefore to get to Fritzing Priscilla would have either to go out into the street and in again at his front door, or go out at her back door and in again at his. Any meals, too, she might choose to have served alone would have to be carried round to her from the kitchen in Fritzing's half, either through the backyard or through the street.

Tussie thought of this each time he sat at his own meals, surrounded by deft menials, lapped as he told himself in luxury,—oh, thought Tussie writhing, it was base. His much-tried mother had to listen to many a cross and cryptic remark flung across the table from the dear boy who had always been so gentle; and more than that, he put his foot down once and for all and refused with a flatness that silenced her to eat any more patent foods. "Absurd," cried Tussie. "No wonder I'm such an idiot. Who could be anything else with his stomach full of starch? Why, I believe the stuff has filled my veins with milk instead of good honest blood."

"Dearest, I'll have it thrown out of the nearest window," said Lady Shuttleworth, smiling bravely in her poor Tussie's small cross face. "But what shall I give you instead? You know you won't eat meat."

"Give me lentils," cried Tussie. "They're cheap."

"Cheap?"

"Mother, I do think it offensive to spend much on what goes into or onto one's body. Why not have fewer things, and give the rest to the poor?"

"But I do give the rest to the poor; I'm always doing it. And there's quite enough for us and for the poor too."

"Give them more, then. Why," fumed Tussie, "can't we live decently? Hasn't it struck you that we're very vulgar?"

"No, dearest, I can't say that it has."

"Well, we are. Everything we have that is beyond bare necessaries makes us vulgar. And surely, mother, you do see that that's not a nice thing to be."

"It's a horrid thing to be," said his mother, arranging his tie with an immense and lingering tenderness.

"It's a difficult thing not to be," said Tussie, "if one is rich. Hasn't it struck you that this ridiculous big house, and the masses of things in it, and the whole place and all the money will inevitably end by crushing us both out of heaven?"

"No, I can't say it has. I expect you've been thinking of things like the eyes of needles and camels having to go through them," said his mother, still patting and stroking his tie.

"Well, that's terrifically true," mused Tussie, reflecting ruefully on the size and weight of the money-bags that were dragging him down into darkness. Then he added suddenly, "Will you have a small bed—a little iron one—put in my bedroom?"

"A small bed? But there's a bed there already, dear."

"That big thing's only fit for a sick woman. I won't wallow in it any longer."

"But dearest, all your forefathers wallowed, as you call it, in it. Doesn't it seem rather—a pity not to carry on traditions?"

"Well mother be kind and dear, and let me depart in peace from them. A camp bed,—that's what I'd like. Shall I order it, or will you? And did I tell you I've given Bryce the sack?"

"Bryce? Why, what has he done?"

"Oh he hasn't done anything that I know of, except make a sort of doll or baby of me. Why should I be put into my clothes and taken out of them again as though I hadn't been weaned yet?"

Now all this was very bad, but the greatest blow for Lady Shuttleworth fell when Tussie declared that he would not come of age. The cheerful face with which his mother had managed to listen to his other defiances went very blank at that; do what she would she could not prevent its falling. "Not come of age?" she repeated stupidly. "But my darling, you can't help yourself—you must come of age."

"Oh I know I can't help being twenty-one and coming into all this"—and he waved contemptuous arms—"but I won't do it blatantly."

"I—I don't understand," faltered Lady Shuttleworth.

"There mustn't be any fuss, mother."

"Do you mean no one is to come?"

"No one at all, except the tenants and people. Of course they are to have their fun—I'll see that they have a jolly good time. But I won't have our own set and the relations."

"Tussie, they've all accepted."

"Send round circulars."

"Tussie, you are putting me in a most painful position."

"Dear mother, I'm very sorry for that. I wish I'd thought like this sooner. But really the idea is so revolting to me—it's so sickening to think of all these people coming to pretend to rejoice over a worm like myself."

"Tussle, you are not a worm."

"And then the expense and waste of entertaining them—the dreariness, the boredom—oh, I wish I only possessed a tub—one single tub—or had the pluck to live like Lavengro in a dingle."

"It's quite impossible to stop it now," interrupted Lady Shuttleworth in the greatest distress; of Lavengro she had never heard.

"Yes you can, mother. Write and put it off."

"Write? What could I write? To-day is Tuesday, and they all arrive on Friday. What excuse can I make at the last moment? And how can a birthday be put off? My dearest boy, I simply can't." And Lady Shuttleworth, the sensible, the cheery, the resourceful, the perennially brave, wrung her hands and began quite helplessly to cry.

This unusual and pitiful sight at once conquered Tussie. For a moment he stood aghast; then his arms were round his mother, and he promised everything she wanted. What he said to her besides and what she sobbed back to him I shall not tell. They never spoke of it again; but for years they both looked back to it, that precious moment of clinging together with bursting hearts, her old cheek against his young one, her tears on his face, as to one of the most acutely sweet, acutely, painfully, tender experiences of their joint lives.

It will be conceded that Priscilla had achieved a good deal in the one week that had passed since she laid aside her high estate and stepped down among ordinary people for the purpose of being and doing good. She had brought violent discord into a hitherto peaceful vicarage, thwarted the hopes of a mother, been the cause of a bitter quarrel between her and her son, brought out by her mysteriousness a prying tendency in the son that might have gone on sleeping for ever, entirely upset the amiable Tussie's life by rending him asunder with a love as strong as it was necessarily hopeless, made his mother anxious and unhappy, and, what was perhaps the greatest achievement of all, actually succeeded in making that mother cry. For of course Priscilla was the ultimate cause of these unusual tears, as Lady Shuttleworth very well knew. Lady Shuttleworth was the deceased Sir Augustus's second wife, had married him when she was over forty and well out of the crying stage, which in the busy does not last beyond childhood, had lost him soon after Tussie's birth, had cried copiously and most properly at his funeral, and had not cried since. It was then undoubtedly a great achievement on the part of the young lady from nowhere, this wringing of tears out of eyes that had been dry for one and twenty years. But the list of what Priscilla had done does not end with this havoc among mothers. Had she not interrupted the decent course of Mrs. Jones's dying, and snatched her back to a hankering after the unfit? Had she not taught the entire village to break the Sabbath? Had she not made all its children either sick or cross under the pretence of giving them a treat? On the Monday she did something else that was equally well-meaning, and yet, as I shall presently relate, of disastrous consequences: she went round the village from cottage to cottage making friends with the children's mothers and leaving behind her, wherever she went, little presents of money. She had found money so extraordinarily efficacious in the comforting of Mrs. Jones that before she started she told Fritzing to fill her purse well, and in each cottage it was made somehow so clear how badly different things were wanted that the purse was empty before she was half round the village and she had to go back for a fresh supply. She was extremely happy that afternoon, and so were the visited mothers. They, indeed, talked of nothing else for the rest of the day, discussed it over their garden hedges, looked in on each other to compare notes, hurried to meet their husbands on their return from work to tell them about it, and were made at one stroke into something very like a colony of eager beggars. And in spite of Priscilla's injunction to Mrs. Jones to hide her five-pound note all Symford knew of that as well, and also of the five-pound note Mrs. Morrison had taken away. Nothing was talked of in Symford but Priscilla. She had in one week created quite a number of disturbances of a nature fruitful for evil in that orderly village; and when on the Tuesday she and Fritzing moved into Creeper Cottage they were objects of the intensest interest to the entire country side, and the report of their riches, their recklessness, and their eccentric choice of a dwelling had rolled over the intervening hills as far as Minehead, where it was the subject of many interesting comments in the local papers.

They got into their cottage about tea time; and the first thing Priscilla did was to exclaim at the pleasant sight of the wood fire and sit down in the easy-chair to warm herself. We know who was sitting in it already; and thus she was received by Bad Luck at once into her very lap, and clutched about securely by that unpleasant lady's cold and skinny arms. She looked up at Fritzing with a shiver to remark wonderingly that the room, in spite of its big fire and its smallness, was like ice, but her lips fell apart in a frozen stare and she gazed blankly past him at the wall behind his head. "Look," she whispered, pointing with a horrified forefinger. And Fritzing, turning quickly, was just in time to snatch a row of cheap coloured portraits from the wall and fling them face downwards under the table before Tussie came in to ask if he could do anything.

The portraits were those of all the reigning princes of Germany and had been put up as a delicate compliment by the representative of the Minehead furnishers, while Priscilla and Fritzing were taking leave of Baker's Farm; and the print Priscilla's eye had lighted on was the portrait of her august parent, smiling at her. He was splendid in state robes and orders, and there was a charger, and an obviously expensive looped-up curtain, and much smoke as of nations furiously raging together in the background, and outside this magnificence meandered the unmeaning rosebuds of Priscilla's cheap wallpaper. His smile seemed very terrible under the circumstances. Fritzing felt this, and seized him and flung him with a desperate energy under the table, where he went on smiling, as Priscilla remembered with a guilty shudder, at nothing but oilcloth. "I don't believe I'll sleep if I know he—he's got nothing he'd like better than oilcloth to look at," she whispered with an awestruck face to Fritzing as Tussie came in.

"I will cause them all to be returned," Fritzing assured her.

"What, have those people sent wrong things?" asked Tussie anxiously, who felt that the entire responsibility of this menage was on his shoulders.

"Oh, only some cheap prints," said Priscilla hastily. "I think they're called oleographs or something."

"What impertinence," said Tussie hotly.

"I expect it was kindly meant, but I—I like my cottage quite plain."

"I'll have them sent back, sir," Tussie said to Fritzing, who was rubbing his hands nervously through his hair; for the sight of his grand ducal master's face smiling at him on whom he would surely never wish to smile again, and doing it, too, from the walls of Creeper Cottage, had given him a shock.

"You are ever helpful, young man," he said, bowing abstractedly and going away to put down his hat and umbrella; and Priscilla, with a cold feeling that she had had a bad omen, rang the handbell Tussie's thoughtfulness had placed on her table and ordered Annalise to bring tea.

Now Annalise had been standing on the threshold of her attic staring at it in an amazement too deep for words when the bell fetched her down. She appeared, however, before her mistress with a composed face, received the order with her customary respectfulness, and sought out Fritzing to inquire of him where the servants were to be found. "Her Grand Ducal Highness desires tea," announced Annalise, appearing in Fritzing's sitting-room, where he was standing absorbed in the bill from the furnishers that he had found lying on his table.

"Then take it in," said Fritzing impatiently, without looking up.

"To whom shall I give the order?" inquired Annalise.

"To whom shall you give the order?" repeated Fritzing, pausing in his study to stare at her, the bill in one hand and his pocket-handkerchief, with which he was mopping his forehead, in the other.

"Where," asked Annalise, "shall I find the cook?"

"Where shall you find the cook?" repeated Fritzing, staring still harder. "This house is so gigantic is it not," he said with an enormous sarcasm, "that no doubt the cook has lost himself. Have you perhaps omitted to investigate the coal-hole?"

"Herr Geheimrath, where shall I find the cook?" asked Annalise tossing her head.

"Fraeulein, is there a mirror in your bedroom?"

"The smallest I ever saw. Only one-half of my face can I see reflected in it at a time."

"Fraeulein, the half of that face you see reflected in it is the half of the face of the cook."

"I do not understand," said Annalise.

"Yet it is as clear as shining after rain. You, mein liebes Kind, are the cook."

It was now Annalise's turn to stare, and she stood for a moment doing it, her face changing from white to red while Fritzing turned his back and taking out a pencil made little sums on the margin of the bill. "Herr Geheimrath, I am not a cook," she said at last, swallowing her indignation.

"What, still there?" he exclaimed, looking up sharply. "Unworthy one, get thee quickly to the kitchen. Is it seemly to keep the Princess waiting?"

"I am not a cook," said Annalise defiantly. "I was not engaged as a cook, I never was a cook, and I will not be a cook."

Fritzing flung down the bill and came and glared close into Annalise's face. "Not a cook?" he cried. "You, a German girl, the daughter of poor parents, you are not ashamed to say it? You do not hide your head for shame? No—a being so useful, so necessary, so worthy of respect as a cook you are not and never will be. I'll tell you what you are,—I've told you once already, and I repeat it—you are a knave, my Fraeulein, a knave, I say. And in those parts of your miserable nature where you are not a knave—for I willingly concede that no man or woman is bad all through—in those parts, I say, where your knavishness is intermittent, you are an absolute, unmitigated fool."

"I will not bear this," cried Annalise.

"Will not! Cannot! Shall not! Inept Negation, get thee to thy kitchen and seek wisdom among the pots."

"I am no one's slave," cried Annalise, "I am no one's prisoner."

"Hark at her! Who said you were? Have I not told you the only two things you are?"

"But I am treated as a prisoner, I am treated as a slave," sobbed Annalise.

"Unmannerly one, how dare you linger talking follies when your royal mistress is waiting for her tea? Run—run! Or must I show you how?"

"Her Grand Ducal Highness," said Annalise, not budging, "told me also to prepare the bath for her this evening."

"Well, what of that?" cried Fritzing, snatching up the bill again and adding up furiously. "Prepare it, then."

"I see no water-taps."

"Woman, there are none."

"How can I prepare a bath without water-taps?"

"O thou Inefficiency! Ineptitude garbed as woman! Must I then teach thee the elements of thy business? Hast thou not observed the pump? Go to it, and draw water. Cause the water to flow into buckets. Carry these buckets—need I go on? Will not Nature herself teach thee what to do with buckets?"

Annalise flushed scarlet. "I will not go to the pump," she said.

"What, you will not carry out her Grand Ducal Highness's orders?"

"I will not go to the pump."

"You refuse to prepare the bath?"

"I will not go to the pump."

"You refuse to prepare the tea?"

"I will not be a cook."

"You are rankly rebellious?"

"I will not sleep in the attic."

"What!"

"I will not eat the food."

"What!"

"I will not do the work."

"What!"

"I will go."

"Go?"

"Go," repeated Annalise, stamping her foot. "I demand my wages, the increased wages that were promised me, and I will go."

"And where, Impudence past believing, will you go, in a country whose tongue you most luckily do not understand?"

Annalise looked up into Fritzing's furious eyes with the challenge of him who flings down his trump card. "Go?" she cried, with a defiance that was blood-curdling in one so small and hitherto so silent, "I will first go to that young gentleman who speaks my language and I will tell him all, and then, with his assistance, I will go straight—but straight, do you hear?"—and she stamped her foot again—"to Lothen-Kunitz."



XIV

Early in this story I pointed out what to the intelligent must have been from the beginning apparent, that Annalise held Priscilla and Fritzing in the hollow of her hand. In the first excitement of the start she had not noticed it, but during those woeful days of disillusionment at Baker's she saw it with an ever-growing clearness; and since Sunday, since the day she found a smiling young gentleman ready to talk German to her and answer questions, she was perfectly aware that she had only to close her hand and her victims would squeeze into any shape she liked. She proposed to do this closing at the first moment of sheer intolerableness, and that moment seemed well reached when she entered Creeper Cottage and realized what the attic, the kitchen, and the pump really meant.

It is always a shock to find one's self in the company of a worm that turns, always a shock and an amazement; a spectacle one never, somehow, gets used to. But how dreadful does it become when one is in the power of the worm, and the worm is resentful, and ready to squeeze to any extent. Fritzing reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite well have been left at home. Quite well? A thousand times better. What had she done but whine during her passive period? And now that she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the base-born, the empty-brained, was actually going to be able to ruin the plans of the noblest woman on earth.

Thus thought Fritzing, mopping his forehead. Annalise had rushed away to her attic after flinging her defiance at him, her spirit ready to dare anything but her body too small, she felt, to risk staying within reach of a man who looked more like somebody who meant to shake her than any one she had ever seen. Fritzing mopped his forehead, and mopped and mopped again. He stood where she had left him, his eyes fixed on the ground, his distress so extreme that he was quite near crying. What was he to do? What was he to say to his Princess? How was he to stop the girl's going back to Kunitz? How was he to stop her going even so far as young Morrison? That she should tell young Morrison who Priscilla was would indeed be a terrible thing. It would end their being able to live in Symford. It would end their being able to live in England. The Grand Duke would be after them, and there would have to be another flight to another country, another start there, another search for a home, another set of explanations, pretences, fears, lies,—things of which he was so weary. But there was something else, something worse than any of these things, that made Fritzing mop his forehead with so extreme a desperation: Annalise had demanded the money due to her, and Fritzing had no money.

I am afraid Fritzing was never meant for a conspirator. Nature never meant him to be a plotter, an arranger of unpleasant surprises for parents. She never meant him to run away. She meant him, probably, to spend his days communing with the past in a lofty room with distempered walls and busts round them. That he should be forced to act, to decide, to be artful, to wrangle with maids, to make ends meet, to squeeze his long frame and explosive disposition into a Creeper Cottage where only an ill-fitting door separated him from the noise and fumes of the kitchen, was surely a cruel trick of Fate, and not less cruel because he had brought it on himself. That he should have thought he could run away as well as any man is merely a proof of his singleness of soul. A man who does that successfully is always, among a great many other things, a man who takes plenty of money with him and knows exactly where to put his hand on more when it is wanted. Fritzing had thought it better to get away quickly with little money than to wait and get away with more. He had seized all he could of his own that was not invested, and Priscilla had drawn her loose cash from the Kunitz bank; but what he took hidden in his gaiters after paying for Priscilla's outfit and bribing Annalise was not more than three hundred pounds; and what is three hundred pounds to a person who buys and furnishes cottages and scatters five-pound notes among the poor? The cottages were paid for. He had insisted on doing that at once, chiefly in order to close his dealings with Mr. Dawson; but Mr. Dawson had not let them go for less than a hundred and fifty for the two, in spite of Tussie's having said a hundred was enough. When Fritzing told Mr. Dawson what Tussie had said Mr. Dawson soon proved that Tussie could not possibly have meant it; and Fritzing, knowing how rich Priscilla really was and what vast savings he had himself lying over in Germany in comfortable securities, paid him without arguing and hastened from the hated presence. Then the journey for the three from Kunitz had been expensive; the stay at Baker's Farm had been, strange to say, expensive; Mrs. Jones's comforting had been expensive; the village mothers had twice emptied Priscilla's purse of ten pounds; and the treat to the Symford children had not been cheap. After paying for this—the Minehead confectioner turned out to be a man of little faith in unknown foreigners, and insisted on being paid at once—Fritzing had about forty pounds left. This, he had thought, would do for food and lights and things for a long while,—certainly till he had hit on a plan by which he would be able to get hold of the Princess's money and his own without betraying where they were; and here on his table, the second unpleasant surprise that greeted him on entering his new home (the first had been his late master's dreadful smile) was the bill for the furnishing of it. To a man possessed of only forty pounds any bill will seem tremendous. This one was for nearly two hundred; and at the end of the long list of items, the biggest of which was that bathroom without water that had sent Annalise out on strike, was the information that a remittance would oblige. A remittance! Poor Fritzing. He crushed the paper in his hand and made caustic mental comments on the indecency of these people, clamouring for their money almost before the last workman was out of the place, certainly before the smell of paint was out of it, and clamouring, too, in the face of the Shuttleworth countenance and support. He had not been a week yet in Symford, and had been so busy, so rushed, that he had put off thinking out a plan for getting his money over from Germany until he should be settled. Never had he imagined people would demand payment in this manner. Never, either, had he imagined the Princess would want so much money for the poor; and never, of course, had he imagined that there would be a children's treat within three days of their arrival. Least of all had he dreamed that Annalise would so soon need more bribing; for that was clearly the only thing to do. He saw it was the only thing, after he had stood for some time thinking and wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. She must be bribed, silenced, given in to. He must part with as much as he possibly could of that last forty pounds; as much, also, as he possibly could of his pride, and submit to have the hussy's foot on his neck. Some day, some day, thought Fritzing grinding his teeth, he would be even with her; and when that day came he promised himself that it should certainly begin with a sound shaking. "Truly," he reflected, "the foolish things of the world confound the wise, and the weak things of the world confound the things that are mighty." And he went out, and standing in the back yard beneath Annalise's window softly called to her. "Fraeulein," called Fritzing, softly as a dove wooing its mate.

"Aha," thought Annalise, sitting on her bed, quick to mark the change; but she did not move.

"Fraeulein," called Fritzing again; and it was hardly a call so much as a melodious murmur.

Annalise did not move, but she grinned.

"Fraeulein, come down one moment," cooed Fritzing, whose head was quite near the attic window so low was Creeper Cottage. "I wish to speak to you. I wish to give you something."

Annalise did not move, but she stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth; for the first time since she left Calais she was enjoying herself.

"If," went on Fritzing after an anxious pause, "I was sharp with you just now—and I fear I may have been hasty—you should not take it amiss from one who, like Brutus, is sick of many griefs. Come down, Fraeulein, and let me make amends."

The Princess's bell rang. At once habit impelled Annalise to that which Fritzing's pleadings would never have effected; she scrambled down the ladder, and leaving him still under her window presented herself before her mistress with her usual face of meek respect.

"I said tea," said Priscilla very distinctly, looking at her with slightly lifted eyebrows.

Annalise curtseyed and disappeared.

"How fearfully polite German maids are," remarked Tussie.

"In what way?" asked Priscilla.

"Those curtseys. They're magnificent."

"Don't English maids curtsey?"

"None that I've ever seen. Perhaps they do to royalties."

"Oh?" said Priscilla with a little jump. She was still so much unnerved by the unexpected meeting with her father on the wall of Creeper Cottage that she could not prevent the little jump.

"What would German maids do, I wonder, in dealing with royalties," said Tussie, "if they curtsey so beautifully to ordinary mistresses? They'd have to go down on their knees to a princess, wouldn't they?"

"How should I know?" said Priscilla, irritably, alarmed to feel she was turning red; and with great determination she began to talk literature.

Fritzing was lying in wait for Annalise, and caught her as she came into the bathroom.

"Fraeulein," said the miserable man trying to screw his face into persuasiveness, "you cannot let the Princess go without tea."

"Yes I can," said Annalise.

He thrust his hands into his pockets to keep them off her shoulders.

"Make it this once, Fraeulein, and I will hire a woman of the village to make it in future. And see, you must not leave the Princess's service, a service of such great honour to yourself, because I chanced to be perhaps a little—hasty. I will give you two hundred marks to console you for the slight though undoubted difference in the mode of living, and I will, as I said, hire a woman to come each day and cook. Will it not be well so?"

"No," said Annalise.

"No?"

Annalise put her hands on her hips, and swaying lightly from side to side began to sing softly. Fritzing gazed at this fresh development in her manners in silent astonishment. "Jedermann macht mir die Cour, c'est l'amour, c'est l'amour," sang Annalise, her head one side, her eyes on the ceiling.

"Liebes Kind, are your promises of no value? Did you not promise to keep your mouth shut, and not betray the Princess's confidence? Did she not seek you out from all the others for the honour of keeping her secrets? And you will, after one week, divulge them to a stranger? You will leave her service? You will return to Kunitz? Is it well so?"

"C'est l'amour, c'est l'amour," sang Annalise, swaying.

"Is it well so, Fraeulein?" repeated Fritzing, strangling a furious desire to slap her.

"Did you speak?" inquired Annalise, pausing in her song.

"I am speaking all the time. I asked if it were well to betray the secrets of your royal mistress."

"I have been starved," said Annalise.

"You have had the same fare as ourselves."

"I have been called names."

"Have I not expressed—regret?"

"I have been treated as dirt."

"Well, well, I have apologized."

"If you had behaved to me as a maid of a royal lady should be behaved to, I would have faithfully done my part and kept silence. Now give me my money and I will go."

"I will give you your money—certainly, liebes Kind. It is what I am most desirous of doing. But only on condition that you stay. If you go, you go without it. If you stay, I will do as I said about the cook and will—" Fritzing paused—"I will endeavour to refrain from calling you anything hasty."

"Two hundred marks," said Annalise gazing at the ceiling, "is nothing."

"Nothing?" cried Fritzing. "You know very well that it is, for you, a great sum."

"It is nothing. I require a thousand."

"A thousand? What, fifty English sovereigns? Nay, then, but there is no reasoning with you," cried Fritzing in tones of real despair.

She caught the conviction in them and hesitated. "Eight hundred, then," she said.

"Impossible. And besides it would be a sin. I will give you twenty."

"Twenty? Twenty marks?" Annalise stared at him a moment then resumed her swaying and her song—"Jedermann macht mir die Cour"—sang Annalise with redoubled conviction.

"No, no, not marks—twenty pounds," said Fritzing, interrupting what was to him a most maddening music. "Four hundred marks. As much as many a German girl can only earn by labouring two years you will receive for doing nothing but hold your tongue."

Annalise closed her lips tightly and shook her head. "My tongue cannot be held for that," she said, beginning to sway again and hum.

Adjectives foamed on Fritzing's own, but he kept them back. "Maedchen," he said with the gentleness of a pastor in a confirmation class, "do you not remember that the love of money is the root of all evil? I do not recognize you. Since when have you become thus greedy for it?"

"Give me eight hundred and I will stop."

"I will give you six hundred," said Fritzing, fighting for each of his last precious pounds.

"Eight."

"Six."

"I said eight," said Annalise, stopping and looking at him with lifted eye-brows and exactly imitating the distinctness with which the Princess had just said "I said tea."

"Six is an enormous sum. Why, what would you do with it?"

"That is my affair. Perhaps buy food," she said with a malicious side-glance.

"I tell you there shall be a cook."

"A cook," said Annalise counting on her fingers,—"and a good cook, observe—not a cook like the Frau Pearce—a cook, then, no more rude names, and eight hundred marks. Then I stop. I suffer. I am silent."

"It cannot be done. I cannot give you eight."

"C'est l'amour, c'est l'amour.... The Princess waits for her tea. I will prepare it for her this once. I am good, you see, at heart. But I must have eight hundred marks. Cest l'amo-o-o-o-o-our."