“I will cause them all to be returned,” Fritzing assured her.

“What, have those people sent wrong things?” asked Tussie anxiously, who felt that the entire responsibility of this menage was on his shoulders.

“Oh, only some cheap prints,” said Priscilla hastily.  “I think they’re called oleographs or something.”

“What impertinence,” said Tussie hotly.

“I expect it was kindly meant, but I—­I like my cottage quite plain.”

“I’ll have them sent back, sir,” Tussie said to Fritzing, who was rubbing his hands nervously through his hair; for the sight of his grand ducal master’s face smiling at him on whom he would surely never wish to smile again, and doing it, too, from the walls of Creeper Cottage, had given him a shock.

“You are ever helpful, young man,” he said, bowing abstractedly and going away to put down his hat and umbrella; and Priscilla, with a cold feeling that she had had a bad omen, rang the handbell Tussie’s thoughtfulness had placed on her table and ordered Annalise to bring tea.

Now Annalise had been standing on the threshold of her attic staring at it in an amazement too deep for words when the bell fetched her down.  She appeared, however, before her mistress with a composed face, received the order with her customary respectfulness, and sought out Fritzing to inquire of him where the servants were to be found.  “Her Grand Ducal Highness desires tea,” announced Annalise, appearing in Fritzing’s sitting-room, where he was standing absorbed in the bill from the furnishers that he had found lying on his table.

“Then take it in,” said Fritzing impatiently, without looking up.

“To whom shall I give the order?” inquired Annalise.

“To whom shall you give the order?” repeated Fritzing, pausing in his study to stare at her, the bill in one hand and his pocket-handkerchief, with which he was mopping his forehead, in the other.

“Where,” asked Annalise, “shall I find the cook?”

“Where shall you find the cook?” repeated Fritzing, staring still harder.  “This house is so gigantic is it not,” he said with an enormous sarcasm, “that no doubt the cook has lost himself.  Have you perhaps omitted to investigate the coal-hole?”

“Herr Geheimrath, where shall I find the cook?” asked Annalise tossing her head.

“Fraeulein, is there a mirror in your bedroom?”

“The smallest I ever saw.  Only one-half of my face can I see reflected in it at a time.”

“Fraeulein, the half of that face you see reflected in it is the half of the face of the cook.”

“I do not understand,” said Annalise.

“Yet it is as clear as shining after rain.  You, mein liebes Kind, are the cook.”

It was now Annalise’s turn to stare, and she stood for a moment doing it, her face changing from white to red while Fritzing turned his back and taking out a pencil made little sums on the margin of the bill.  “Herr Geheimrath, I am not a cook,” she said at last, swallowing her indignation.