in a small meek voice as she tripped before him into the
kitchen.

What could he do but follow? Her foot was well on his neck; and it
occurred to him as he rummaged miserably among canisters that if the
creature should take it into her head to marry him he might
conceivably have to let her do it. As it was it was he and not
Annalise who took the kettle out to the pump to fill it, and her face
while he was doing it would have rejoiced her parents or other persons
to whom she was presumably dear, it was wide with so enormous a
satisfaction. Thus terrible is it to be in the power of an Annalise.

XV

The first evening in Creeper Cottage was unpleasant. There was a
blazing wood fire, the curtains were drawn, the lamp shone rosily
through its red shade, and when Priscilla stood up her hair dusted the
oak beams of the ceiling, it was so low. The background, you see, was
perfectly satisfactory; exactly what a cottage background should be on
an autumn night when outside a wet mist is hanging like a grey curtain
across the window panes; and Tussie arriving at nine o'clock to help
consecrate the new life with Shakespeare felt, as he opened the door
and walked out of the darkness into the rosy, cosy little room, that
he need not after all worry himself with doubts as to the divine
girl's being comfortable. Never did place appear more comfortable. It
did not occur to him that a lamp with a red shade and the blaze of a
wood fire will make any place appear comfortable so long as they go on
shining, and he looked up at Priscilla--I am afraid he had to look up
at her when they were both standing--with the broadest smile of
genuine pleasure. "It _does_ look jolly," he said heartily.

His pleasure was doomed to an immediate wiping out. Priscilla smiled,
but with a reservation behind her smile that his sensitive spirit felt
at once. She was alone, and there was no sign whatever either of her
uncle or of preparations for the reading of Shakespeare.

"Is anything not quite right?" Tussie asked, his face falling at once
to an anxious pucker.

Priscilla looked at him and smiled again, but this time the smile was
real, in her eyes as well as on her lips, dancing in them together
with the flickering firelight. "It's rather funny," she said. "It has
never happened to me before. What do you think? I'm hungry."

"Hungry?"

"Hungry."

Tussie stared, arrested in the unwinding of his comforter.

"Really hungry. _Dreadfully_ hung