“I’ll write it for you,” said Robin, taking the note-book from her.  “You know you go into a cottage next week, so I’ll put your new address.”  And he wrote it in a large round hand and gave it to her quickly, for Mrs. Pearce was listening to all this German and watching him write with a look that made him feel cheap.  So cheap did it make him feel that he resisted for the present his desire to go on questioning Annalise, and putting his hands in his pockets sauntered away to the other end of the kitchen where Priscilla sat looking on.  “I’m afraid that really was cheap of me,” he thought ruefully, when he came once more into Priscilla’s sweet presence; but he comforted himself with the reflection that no girl ought to be mysterious, and if this one chose to be so it was fair to cross her plans occasionally.  Yet he went on feeling cheap; and when Tussie who was hurrying along with a cup of chocolate in each hand ran into him and spilt some on his sleeve the sudden rage with which he said “Confound you, Tussie,” had little to do with the hot stuff soaking through to his skin and a great deal with the conviction that Tussie, despised from their common childhood for his weakness, smallness and ugliness, would never have done what he had just done and betrayed what the girl had chosen to keep secret from her maid.

“But why secret?  Why?  Why?” asked Robin, torn with desire to find out all about Priscilla.

“I’m going to do this often,” said Priscilla, looking up at him with a pleased smile.  “I never saw such easily amused little creatures.  Don’t you think it is beautiful, to give poor people a few happy moments sometimes?”

“Very beautiful,” said Robin, his eyes on her face.

“It is what I mean to do in future,” she said dreamily, her chin on her hand.

“It will be expensive,” remarked Robin; for there were nearly two hundred children, and Priscilla had collected the strangest things in food on the long tables as a result of her method, when inviting, of asking each mother what her child best liked to eat and then ordering it with the lavishness of ignorance from Minehead.

“Oh, we shall live so simply ourselves that there will be enough left to do all I want.  And it will be the most blessed change and refreshment, living simply.  Fritzi hated the fuss and luxury quite as much as I did.”

“Did he?” said Robin, holding his breath.  The girl was evidently off her guard.  He had not heard her call her uncle baldly Fritzi before; and what fuss and luxury could a German teacher’s life have known?

“He it was who first made me see that the body is more than meat and the soul than raiment,” mused Priscilla.

“Was he?”

“He pulled my soul out of the flesh-pots.  I’m a sort of Israel come out of Egypt, but an Egypt that was altogether too comfortable.”

“Too comfortable?  Can one be too comfortable?”

“I was.  I couldn’t move or see or breathe for comfort.  It was like a feather bed all over me.”