For a minute or two she stood silent, trying to collect her thoughts, trying to shake off the feeling that she was being called back to life out of a dream.  It had not been a dream, she kept telling herself—­bad though it was it had not been a dream but the reality; and this man dropped suddenly in to the middle of it from another world, he was the dream, part of the dream she had rebelled against and run away from a fortnight before.

Then she looked at him, and she knew she was putting off her soul with nonsense.  Never was anybody less like a dream than the Prince; never was anybody more squarely, more certainly real.  And he was of her own kind, of her own world.  He and she were equals.  They could talk together plainly, baldly, a talk ungarnished and unretarded by deferences on the one side and on the other a kindness apt to become excessive in its anxiety not to appear to condescend.  The feeling that once more after what seemed an eternity she was with an equal was of a singular refreshment.  During those few moments in which they stood silent, facing each other, in spite of her efforts to keep it out, in spite of really conscientious efforts, a great calm came in and spread over her spirit.  Yet she had no reason to feel calm she thought, struggling.  Was there not rather cause for an infinity of shame?  What had he come for?  He of all people.  The scandalously jilted, the affronted, the run away from.  Was it because she had been looking so long at Fritzing that this man seemed so nicely groomed?  Or at Tussie, that he seemed so well put together?  Or at Robin, that he seemed so modest?  Was it because people’s eyes—­Mrs. Morrison’s, Lady Shuttleworth’s—­had been so angry lately whenever they rested on her that his seemed so very kind?  No; she did remember thinking them that, even being struck by them, when she saw him first in Kunitz.  A dull red crept into her face when she remembered that day and what followed.  “It isn’t very snug,” she said at last, trying to hide by a careful coldness of speech all the strange things she was feeling.  “When it rains there are puddles by the door.  The door, you see, opens into the street.”

“I see,” said the Prince.

There was a silence.

“I don’t suppose you really do,” said Priscilla, full of strange feelings.

“My dear cousin?”

“I don’t know if you’ve come to laugh at me?”

“Do I look as if I had?”

“I dare say you think—­because you’ve not been through it yourself—­that it—­it’s rather ridiculous.”

“My dear cousin,” protested the Prince.

Her lips quivered.  She had gone through much, and she had lived for two days only on milk.

“Do you wipe the puddles up, or does old Fritzing?”

“You see you have come to laugh.”

“I hope you’ll believe that I’ve not.  Must I be gloomy?”

“How do you know Fritzing’s here?”

“Why everybody knows that.”