r way to Fritzing as she had
been told and inquired of him what she should cook for his dinner. No
man likes to be interrupted in his groanings; and Fritzing, who was
not hungry and was startled by the sudden appearance of a stranger in
his room asking him intimate questions, a person of whose presence in
the cottage he had been unaware, flew at her. "Woman, what have I to
do with you?" he cried, stopping in his walk and confronting her with
surprising fierceness. "Is it seemly to burst in on a man like this?
Have you no decency? No respect for another's privacy? Begone, I
command you--begone! Begone!" And he made the same movements with his
hands that persons do when they shoo away fowls or other animals in
flocks.

This was too much for the Shuttleworth kitchenmaid. The obligations,
she considered, were all on the side of Creeper Cottage, and she
retreated in amazement and anger to the kitchen, put on her hat and
mackintosh, and at once departed, regardless of the rain and the
consequences, through two miles of dripping lanes to Symford Hall.
What would have happened to her there if she had been discovered by
Tussie I do not know, but I imagine it would have been something bad.
She was saved, however, by his being in bed, clutched by the throat by
a violent cold; and there he lay helpless, burning and shivering and
throbbing, the pains of his body increased a hundredfold by the
distraction of his mind about Priscilla. Why, Tussie asked himself
over and over again, had she looked so strange the night before? Why
had she gone starving to bed? What was she doing to-day? Was the
kitchenmaid taking proper care of her? Was she keeping warm and dry
this shocking weather? Had she slept comfortably the first night in
her little home? Poor Tussie. It is a grievous thing to love any one
too much; a grievous, wasteful, paralyzing thing; a tumbling of the
universe out of focus, a bringing of the whole world down to the mean
level of one desire, a shutting out of wider, more beautiful feelings,
a wrapping of one's self in a thick garment of selfishness, outside
which all the dear, tender, modest, everyday affections and
friendships, the wholesome, ordinary loves, the precious loves of use
and wont, are left to shiver and grow cold. Tussie's mother sat
outside growing very cold indeed. Her heart was stricken within her.
She, most orderly of women, did not in the least mind, so occupied was
she with deeper cares, that her household