counsel.  She needed some kind older woman,—­oh she needed some kind older woman to hold out cool hands of wisdom and show her the way.  But then she would have to make a complete confession of everything she had done, and how would Mrs. Morrison or any other decent woman look upon her flight from her father’s home?  Would they not turn away shuddering from what she now saw was a hideous selfishness and ingratitude?  The altercation going on below rose rapidly in heat.  Just at the end it grew so heated that even through the pillow Priscilla could hear its flaming conclusion.

“Man, I tell you your niece is to all intents and purposes a murderess, a double murderess,” cried Mrs. Morrison.  “Not only has she the woman’s murder to answer for, but the ruined soul of the murderer as well.”

Upon which there was a loud shout of “Hence!  Hence!” and a great slamming of the street door.

For some time after this Priscilla heard fevered walking about in her parlour and sounds as of many and muffled imprecations; then, when they had grown a little more intermittent, careful footsteps came up her stairs, footsteps so careful, so determined not to disturb, that the stairs cracked and wheezed more than they had ever yet been known to do.  Arrived at the top they paused outside her door, and Priscilla, checking her sobs, could hear how Fritzing stood there wrestling with his body’s determination to breathe too loud.  He stood there listening for what seemed to her an eternity.  She almost screamed at last as the minutes passed and she knew he was still there, motionless, listening.  After a long while he went away again with the same anxious care to make no noise, and she, with a movement of utter abandonment to woe, turned over and cried herself sick.

Till evening she lay there alone, and then the steps came up again, accompanied this time by the tinkle of china and spoons.  Priscilla was sitting at the window looking on to the churchyard, staring into the dark with its swaying branches and few faint stars, and when she heard him outside the door listening again in anxious silence she got up and opened it.

Fritzing held a plate of food in one hand and a glass of milk in the other.  The expression on his face was absurdly like that of a mother yearning over a sick child. “Mein liebes Kind—­mein liebes Kind,” he stammered when she came out, so woebegone, so crushed, so utterly unlike any Priscilla of any one of her moods that he had ever seen before.  Her eyes were red, her eyelids heavy with tears, her face was pinched and narrower, the corners of her mouth had a most piteous droop, her very hair, pushed back off her forehead, seemed sad, and hung in spiritless masses about her neck and ears. “Mein liebes Kind,” stammered poor Fritzing; and his hand shook so that he upset some of the milk.

Priscilla leaned against the door-post.  She was feeling sick and giddy.  “How dreadful this is,” she murmured, looking at him with weary, woeful eyes.