she found it extremely
hard not to laugh. On his head he had a cap with ear-pieces that hid
his grey hair; round his neck a gaudy handkerchief muffled well about
his face; immense goggles cloaked the familiar overhanging eyebrows
and deep-set eyes, goggles curiously at variance with the dapper
briskness of his gaitered legs. The Princess was in ordinary blue
serge, short and rather shabby, it having been subjected for hours
daily during the past week to rough treatment by the maid now
travelling to Cologne. As for her face and hair, they were completely
hidden in the swathings of a motor-veil.

The sentinels stared rather as these two figures pushed their bicycles
through the gates, and undoubtedly did for some time afterwards wonder
who they could have been. The same thing happened down below on the
bridge; but once over that and in the town all they had to do was to
ride straight ahead. They were going to bicycle fifteen miles to Ruehl,
a small town with a railway station on the main line between Kunitz
and Cologne. Express trains do not stop at Ruehl, but there was a slow
train at eight which would get them to Gerstein, the capital of the
next duchy, by midnight. Here they would change into the Cologne
express; here they would join the bribed maid; here luggage had been
sent by Fritzing,--a neat bag for himself, and a neat box for his
niece. The neat box was filled with neat garments suggested to him by
the young lady in the shop in Gerstein where he had been two days
before to buy them. She told him of many other articles which, she
said, no lady's wardrobe could be considered complete without; and the
distracted man, fearing the whole shop would presently be put into
trunks and sent to the station to meet them, had ended by flinging
down two notes for a hundred marks each and bidding her keep strictly
within that limit. The young lady became very scornful. She told him
that she had never heard of any one being clothed from head to foot
inside and out, even to brushes, soap, and an umbrella, for two
hundred marks. Fritzing, in dread of conspicuous masses of luggage,
yet staggered by the girl's conviction, pulled out a third hundred
mark note, but added words in his extremity of so strong and final a
nature, that she, quailing, did keep within this limit, and the box
was packed. Thus Priscilla's outfit cost almost exactly fifteen
pounds. It will readily be imagined that it was neat.

Painfully the two fugitives ro