d 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 i