nnalise joyfully,
her eyes gleaming as she willingly flew back to Priscilla's
door,--anything, anything, she thought, sooner than the life she was
leading.

Priscilla heard Fritzing's order and sat up at once, surprised at such
an unprecedented indifference to her comfort. Her heart began to beat
faster; a swift fear that Kunitz was at her heels seized her; she
jumped up and ran out.

Fritzing was standing at the foot of the stairs.

"Come down, ma'am," he said; "I must speak to you at once."

"What's the matter?" asked Priscilla, getting down the steep little
stairs as quickly as was possible without tumbling.

"Hateful English tongue," thought Annalise, to whom the habit the
Princess and Fritzing had got into of talking English together was a
constant annoyance and disappointment.

Fritzing preceded Priscilla into her parlour, and when she was in he
shut the door behind her. Then he leaned his hands on the table to
steady himself and confronted her with a twitching face. Priscilla
looked at him appalled. Was the Grand Duke round the corner?
Lingering, perhaps, among the very tombs just outside her window?
"What is it?" she asked faintly.

"Ma'am, the five pounds has disappeared for ever."

"Really Fritzi, you are too absurd about that wretched five pounds,"
cried Priscilla, blazing into anger.

"But it was all we had."

"All we--?"

"Ma'am, it was positively our last penny."

"I--don't understand."

He made her understand. With paper and pencil, with the bills and his
own calculations, he made her understand. His hands shook, but he
went through with it item by item, through everything they had spent
from the moment they left Kunitz. They were in such a corner, so
tightly jammed, that all efforts to hide it and pretend there was no
corner seemed to him folly. He now saw that such efforts always had
been folly, and that he ought to have seen to it that her mind on this
important point was from the first perfectly clear; then nothing would
have happened. "You have had the misfortune, ma'am, to choose a fool
for your protector in this adventure," he said bitterly, pushing the
papers from him as though he loathed the sight of them.

Priscilla sat dumfoundered. She was looking quite straight for the
first time at certain pitiless aspects of life. For the first time she
was face to face with the sternness, the hardness, the relentlessness
of everything that has to do with money so soon as one has not got