“No, no—­all will be well,” said Fritzing, striving to be brisk.  “Drink some milk, ma’am.”

“Oh, I have been wicked.”

“Wicked?”

Fritzing hastily put the plate and glass down on the floor, and catching up the hand hanging limply by her side passionately kissed it.  “You are the noblest woman on earth,” he said.

“Oh,” said Priscilla, turning away her head and shutting her eyes for very weariness of such futile phrases.

“Ma’am, you are.  I would swear it.  But you are also a child, and so you are ready at the first reverse to suppose you have done with happiness for ever.  Who knows,” said Fritzing with a great show of bright belief in his own prophecy, the while his heart was a stone, “who knows but what you are now on the very threshold of it?”

“Oh,” murmured Priscilla, too beaten to do anything but droop her head.

“It is insisting on the commonplace to remind you, ma’am, that the darkest hour comes before dawn.  Yet it is a well-known natural phenomenon.”

Priscilla leaned her head against the door-post.  She stood there motionless, her hands hanging by her side, her eyes shut, her mouth slightly open, the very picture of one who has given up.

“Drink some milk, ma’am.  At least endeavour to.”

She took no heed of him.

“For God’s sake, ma’am, do not approach these slight misadventures in so tragic a spirit.  You have done nothing wrong whatever.  I know you accuse yourself.  It is madness to do so.  I, who have so often scolded you, who have never spared the lash of my tongue when in past years I saw fair reason to apply it, I tell you now with the same reliable candour that your actions in this village and the motives that prompted them have been in each single case of a stainless nobility.”

She took no heed of him.

He stooped down and picked up the glass.  “Drink some milk, ma’am.  A few mouthfuls, perhaps even one, will help to clear the muddied vision of your mind.  I cannot understand,” he went on, half despairing, half exasperated, “what reasons you can possibly have for refusing to drink some milk.  It is a feat most easily accomplished.”

She did not move.

“Do you perchance imagine that a starved and badly treated body can ever harbour that most precious gift of the gods, a clear, sane mind?”

She did not move.

He looked at her in silence for a moment, then put down the glass.  “This is all my fault,” he said slowly.  “The whole responsibility for this unhappiness is on my shoulders, and I frankly confess it is a burden so grievous that I know not how to bear it.”

He paused, but she took no notice.

“Ma’am, I have loved you.”

She took no notice.

“And the property of love, I have observed, is often to mangle and kill the soul of its object.”

She might have been asleep.