“I wouldn’t call that comfort,” said Robin, for she paused, and he was afraid she was not going on.  “It sounds much more like torture.”

“So it was at last.  And Fritzi helped me to shake it off.  If he hadn’t I’d have smothered slowly, and perhaps if I’d never known him I’d have done it as gracefully as my sisters did.  Why, they don’t know to this day that they are dead.”

Robin was silent.  He was afraid to speak lest anything he said should remind her of the part she ought to be playing.  He had no doubt now at all that she was keeping a secret.  A hundred questions were burning on his lips.  He hated himself for wanting to ask them, for being so inquisitive, for taking advantage of the girl’s being off her guard, but what are you to do with your inherited failings?  Robin’s mother was inquisitive and it had got into his blood, and I know of no moral magnesia that will purify these things away.  “You said the other day,” he burst out at last, quite unable to stop himself, “that you only had your uncle in the world.  Are your sisters—­are they in London?”

“In London?” Priscilla gazed at him a moment with a vague surprise.  Then fright flashed into her eyes.  “Did I not tell you they were dead?  Smothered?” she said, getting up quickly, her face setting into the frown that had so chilled Tussie on the heath.

“But I took that as a parable.”

“How can I help how you took it?”

And she instantly left him and went away round the tables, beginning those little pleasant observations to the children again that struck him as so strange.

Well did he know the sort of thing.  He had seen Lady Shuttleworth do it fifty times to the tenants, to the cottagers, at flower-shows, bazaars, on all occasions of public hospitality or ceremony; but practised and old as Lady Shuttleworth was this girl seemed yet more practised.  She was a finished artist in the work, he said to himself as he leaned against the wall, his handsome face flushed, his eyes sulky, watching her.  It was enough to make any good-looking young man sulky, the mixture of mystery and aloofness about Miss Neumann-Schultz.  Extraordinary as it seemed, up to this point he had found it quite impossible to indulge with her in that form of more or less illustrated dialogue known to Symford youths and maidens as billing and cooing.  Very fain would Robin have billed and have cooed.  It was a practice he excelled in.  And yet though he had devoted himself for three whole days, stood on ladders, nailed up creepers, bought and carried rum, had a horrible scene with his mother because of her, he had not got an inch nearer things personal and cosy.  Miss Neumann-Schultz thanked him quite kindly and graciously for his pains—­oh, she was very gracious; gracious in the sort of way Lady Shuttleworth used to be when he came home for the holidays and she patted his head and uttered benignities—­and having thanked, apparently forgot him till the next time she wanted anything.