on with the gentleman writing cheques, when Robin came home
for Christmas and looked at her he knew at once what she knew.

As for Lady Shuttleworth, she got a letter from Priscilla; quite a
long one, enclosing a little one for Tussie to be given him if and
when his mother thought expedient. Lady Shuttleworth was not surprised
by what she read. She had suspected it from the moment Priscilla rose
up the day she called on her at Baker's Farm and dismissed her. Till
her marriage with the late Sir Augustus she had been lady-in-waiting
to one of the English princesses, and she could not be mistaken on
such points. She knew the sort of thing too well. But she never
forgave Priscilla. How could she? Was the day of Tussie's coming of
age, that dreadful day when he was nearest death, a day a mother could
ever forget? It had all been most wanton, most cruel. We know she was
full of the milk of human kindness: on the subject of Priscilla it was
unmixed gall.

As for Tussie,--well, you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs,
and Tussie on this occasion was the eggs. It is a painful part to
play. He found it exquisitely painful, and vainly sought comfort in
the consolation that it had been Priscilla's omelette. The consolation
proved empty, and for a long while he suffered every sort of torment
known to the sensitive. But he got over it. People do. They will get
over anything if you give them time, and he being young had plenty of
it. He lived it down as one lives down every sorrow and every joy; and
when in the fulness of time, after a series of years in which he went
about listlessly in a soft felt hat and an unsatisfactory collar, he
married, it was to Priscilla's capital that he went for his honeymoon.
She, hearing he was there, sent for them both and was kind.

As for Annalise, she never got her twenty thousand marks. On the
contrary, the vindictive Grand Duke caused her to be prosecuted for
blackmailing, and she would undoubtedly have languished in prison if
Priscilla had not interfered and sent her back to her parents. Like
Mrs. Morrison, she is chastened. She does not turn up her nose so
much. She does not sing. Indeed her songs ceased from the moment she
caught sight through a crack in the kitchen door of the Prince's broad
shoulders filling up Fritzing's sitting-room. From that moment
Annalise swooned from one depth of respect and awe to the other. She
became breathlessly willing, meek to vanishing point. But Prisci