“I won’t,” thought Priscilla, burying her head deeper.  “That poor Emma has lost the note and he’s going to fuss.  I won’t descend.”

Then came Annalise’s tap at her door.  Priscilla did not answer.  Annalise tapped again.  Priscilla did not answer, but turning her head face upwards composed herself to an appearance of sleep.

Annalise tapped a third time.  “The Herr Geheimrath wishes to speak to your Grand Ducal Highness,” she called through the door; and after a pause opened it and peeped in.  “Her Grand Ducal Highness sleeps,” she informed Fritzing down the stairs, her nose at the angle in the air it always took when she spoke to him.

“Then wake her!  Wake her!” cried Fritzing.

“Is it possible something has happened?” thought Annalise 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.