That evening she sang in the kitchen, she sang in the bath-room, she sang in the attic and on the stairs to the attic.  What she sang, persistently, over and over again, and loudest outside Fritzing’s door, was a German song about how beautiful it is at evening when the bells ring one to rest, and the refrain at the end of each verse was ding-dong twice repeated.  Priscilla rang her own bell, unable to endure it, but Annalise did not consider this to be one of those that are beautiful and did not answer it till it had been rung three times.

“Do not sing,” said Priscilla, when she appeared.

“Your Grand Ducal Highness objects?”

Priscilla turned red.  “I’ll give no reasons,” she said icily.  “Do not sing.”

“Yet it is a sign of a light heart.  Your Grand Ducal Highness did not like to see me weep—­she should the more like to hear me rejoice.”

“You can go.”

“My heart to-night is light, because I am the means of being of use to your Grand Ducal Highness, of showing my devotion, of being of service.”

“Do me the service of being quiet.”

Annalise curtseyed and withdrew, and spent the rest of the evening bursting into spasmodic and immediately interrupted song,—­breaking off after a few bars with a cough of remembrance and apology.  When this happened Fritzing and Priscilla looked at each other with grave and meditative eyes; they knew how completely they were in her power.

Fritzing wrote that night to the friend in London who had engaged the rooms for him at Baker’s Farm, and asked him to lend him fifty pounds for a week,—­preferably three hundred (this would cover the furnisher’s bill), but if he could lend neither five would do.  The friend, a teacher of German, could as easily have lent the three hundred as the five, so poor was he, so fit an object for a loan himself; but long before his letter explaining this in words eloquent of regret (for he was a loyal friend) reached Fritzing, many things had happened to that bewildered man to whom so many things had happened already, and caused him to forget both his friend and his request.

This, then, was how the afternoon and evening of Thursday were passed; and on Friday morning, quite unstrung by their sleepless night, Priscilla and Fritzing were proposing to go up together on to the moor, there to seek width and freshness, be blown upon by moist winds, and forget for a little the crushing narrowness and perplexities of Creeper Cottage, when Mrs. Morrison walked in.  She opened the door first and then, when half of her was inside, knocked with her knuckles, which were the only things to knock with on Priscilla’s simple door.