no doubt, had died quietly in her sleep as had been expected, but what folly was all this about a murder?  Yet she sat up in bed and felt rather cold as she looked at Annalise, for Annalise was very pallid.  And then at last she had to believe it.  Annalise had had it told her from beginning to end, with the help of signs, by the charwoman.  She had learned more English in those few crimson minutes than in the whole of the time she had been in England.  The charwoman had begun her demonstration by slowly drawing her finger across her throat from one ear to the other, and Annalise repeated the action for Priscilla’s clearer comprehension.  How Priscilla got up that day and dressed she never knew.  Once at least during the process she stumbled back on to the bed and lay with her face on her arms, shaken by a most desperate weeping.  That fatal charity; those fatal five-pound notes.  Annalise, panic-stricken lest she who possessed so many should be the next victim, poured out the tale of the missing money, of the plain motive for the murder, with a convincingness, a naked truth, that stabbed Priscilla to the heart with each clinching word.

“They say the old woman must have cried out—­must have been awakened, or the man would have taken the money without—­”

“Oh don’t—­oh leave me—­” moaned Priscilla.

She did not go downstairs that day.  Every time Annalise tried to come in she sent her away.  When she was talked to of food, she felt sick.  Once she began to pace about the room, but the sight of those eager black knots of people down the street, of policemen and other important and official-looking persons going in and out of the cottage, drove her back to her bed and its sheltering, world-deadening pillow.  Indeed the waters of life had gone over her head and swallowed her up in hopeless blackness.  She acknowledged herself wrong.  She gave in utterly.  Every word Mrs. Morrison—­a dreadful woman, yet dreadful as she was still a thousand times better than herself—­every word she had said, every one of those bitter words at which she had been so indignant the morning before, was true, was justified.  That day Priscilla tore the last shreds of self-satisfaction from her soul and sat staring at it with horrified eyes as at a thing wholly repulsive, dangerous, blighting.  What was to become of her, and of poor Fritzing, dragged down by her to an equal misery?  About one o’clock she heard Mrs. Morrison’s voice below, in altercation apparently with him.  At this time she was crying again; bitter, burning tears; those scorching tears that follow in the wake of destroyed illusions, that drop, hot and withering, on to the fragments of what was once the guiding glory of an ideal.  She was brought so low, was so humbled, so uncertain of herself, that she felt it would bring her peace if she might go down to Mrs. Morrison and acknowledge all her vileness; tell her how wrong she had been, ask her forgiveness for her rudeness, beg her for pity, for help, for