Lady Shuttleworth stared at him, wide-eyed and speechless.

“It’s absurd, you know, to let him get into this state.  I’ve often warned you.  He can’t be allowed to play ducks and drakes with himself like other young men.  He’s got no strength to fall back upon.  I consider you are directly responsible for this illness.  Why do you let him go out at night this time of year?  Why do you let him over-exert himself?  I suppose,” said the doctor, who had brought Tussie into the world and was as brutal as he was clever, besides being at that moment extremely angry, “I suppose you want to lose him, eh?”

How could she explain to him what she knew to be true, that the one person responsible for Tussie’s illness was Priscilla?  She therefore only stared, wide-eyed and speechless; and indeed her heart was very nearly broken.

XVII

About three o’clock that afternoon Priscilla saw quite clearly what she had dimly perceived in the morning, that if there was to be domestic peace in Creeper Cottage she must bestir herself.  She did not like bestirring herself; at least, not in such directions.  She would go out and help the poor, talk to them, cheer them, nurse their babies even and stir their porridge, but she had not up to this point realized her own needs, and how urgent they could be and how importunate.  It was hunger that cleared her vision.  The first time she was hungry she had been amused.  Now when it happened again she was both surprised and indignant.  “Can one’s wretched body never keep quiet?” she thought impatiently, when the first twinges dragged her relentlessly out of her dejected dreaming by the fire.  She remembered the cold tremblings of the night before, and felt that that state would certainly be reached again quite soon if she did not stop it at once.  She rang for Annalise.  “Tell the cook I will have some luncheon after all,” she said.

“The cook is gone,” said Annalise, whose eyes were more aggressively swollen than they had yet been.

“Gone where?”

“Gone away.  Gone for ever.”

“But why?” asked Priscilla, really dismayed.

“The Herr Geheimrath insulted her.  I heard him doing it.  No woman of decency can permit such a tone.  She at once left.  There has been no dinner to-day.  There will be, I greatly fear, n—­o—­o—­supp—­pper.”  And Annalise gave a loud sob and covered her face with her apron.

Then Priscilla saw that if life was to roll along at all it was her shoulder that would have to be put to the wheel.  Fritzing’s shoulder was evidently not a popular one among the lower classes.  The vision of her own doing anything with wheels was sufficiently amazing, but she did not stop to gaze upon it.  “Annalise,” she said, getting up quickly and giving herself a little shake, “fetch me my hat and coat.  I’m going out.”

Annalise let her apron drop far enough to enable her to point to the deluge going on out of doors.  “Not in this weather?” she faltered, images of garments soaked in mud and needing much drying and brushing troubling her.