“Have you finished what you came for?”

“You are the most brazen—­”

“Hush.  Do be careful.  Suppose my uncle were to hear you?  If you’ve finished won’t you go?”

“Go?  I shall not go till I have said my say.  I shall send the vicar to you about Robin—­such conduct is so—­so infamous that I can’t—­I can’t—­I can’t—­”

“I’m sorry if it has distressed you.”

“Distressed me?  You are the most—­”

“Really I think we’ve done, haven’t we?” said Priscilla hurriedly, dreadfully afraid lest Fritzing should come in and hear her being called names.

“To think that you dared—­to think that my—­my noble boy—­”

“He wasn’t very noble.  Mothers don’t ever really know their sons, I think.”

“Shameless girl!” cried Mrs. Morrison, so loud, so completely beside herself, that Priscilla hastily rang her bell, certain that Fritzing must hear and would plunge in to her rescue; and of all things she had learned to dread Fritzing’s plunging to her rescue.  “Open the door for this lady,” she said to Annalise, who appeared with a marvellous promptitude; and as Mrs. Morrison still stood her ground and refused to see either Annalise or the door Priscilla ended the interview by walking out herself, with great dignity, into the bathroom.

XXI

And now I have come to a part of my story that I would much rather not write.  Always my inclination if left alone is to sit in the sun and sing of things like crocuses, of nothing less fresh and clean than crocuses.  The engaging sprightliness of crocuses; their dear little smell, not to be smelled except by the privileged few; their luminous transparency—­I am thinking of the white and the purple; their kind way of not keeping hearts sick for Spring waiting longer than they can just bear; how pleasant to sit with a friend in the sun, a friend who like myself likes to babble of green fields, and talk together about all things flowery.  But Priscilla’s story has taken such a hold on me, it seemed when first I heard it to be so full of lessons, that I feel bound to set it down from beginning to end for the use and warning of all persons, princesses and others, who think that by searching, by going far afield, they will find happiness, and do not see that it is lying all the while at their feet.  They do not see it because it is so close.  It is so close that there is a danger of its being trodden on or kicked away.  And it is shy, and waits to be picked up.  Priscilla, we know, went very far afield in search of hers, and having undertaken to tell of what befell her I must not now, only because I would rather, suppress any portion of the story.  Besides, it is a portion vital to the catastrophe.