earing
each in its turn with a tremendous splash and gurgle. Then they walked
on quickly towards the railway station, infinitely relieved to be on
their own feet again, and between them, all unsuspected, walked the
radiant One with the smiling eyes, she who was half-minded to see this
game through, giving the players just so many frights as would keep
her amused, the fickle, laughing goddess Good Luck.

They caught the train neatly at Ruehl. They only had to wait about the
station for ten minutes before it came in. Hardly any one was there,
and nobody took the least notice of them. Fritzing, after a careful
look round to see if it contained people he knew, put the Princess
into a second-class carriage labelled _Frauen_, and then respectfully
withdrew to another part of the train. He had decided that
second-class was safest. People in that country nearly always travel
second-class, especially women,--at all times in such matters more
economical than men; and a woman by herself in a first-class carriage
would have been an object of surmise and curiosity at every station.
Therefore Priscilla was put into the carriage labelled _Frauen_, and
found herself for the first time in her life alone with what she had
hitherto only heard alluded to vaguely as the public.

She sat down in a corner with an odd feeling of surprise at being
included in the category _Frauen_, and giving a swift timid glance
through her veil at the public confronting her was relieved to find it
consisted only of a comfortable mother and her child.

I know not why the adjective comfortable should so invariably be
descriptive of mothers in Germany. In England and France though you
may be a mother, you yet, I believe, may be so without being
comfortable. In Germany, somehow, you can't. Perhaps it is the
climate; perhaps it is the food; perhaps it is simply want of soul, or
that your soul does not burn with a fire sufficiently consuming.
Anyhow it is so. This mother had all the good-nature that goes with
amplitude. Being engaged in feeding her child with _belegte
Broedchen_--that immensely satisfying form of sandwich--she at once
offered Priscilla one.

"No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking into her corner.

"Do take one, Fraeulein," said the mother, persuasively.

"No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking.

"On a journey it passes the time. Even if one is not hungry, thank God
one can always eat. Do take one."

"No thank you," said Priscilla.