“And where, Impudence past believing, will you go, in a country whose tongue you most luckily do not understand?”

Annalise looked up into Fritzing’s furious eyes with the challenge of him who flings down his trump card.  “Go?” she cried, with a defiance that was blood-curdling in one so small and hitherto so silent, “I will first go to that young gentleman who speaks my language and I will tell him all, and then, with his assistance, I will go straight—­but straight, do you hear?”—­and she stamped her foot again—­“to Lothen-Kunitz.”

XIV

Early in this story I pointed out what to the intelligent must have been from the beginning apparent, that Annalise held Priscilla and Fritzing in the hollow of her hand.  In the first excitement of the start she had not noticed it, but during those woeful days of disillusionment at Baker’s she saw it with an ever-growing clearness; and since Sunday, since the day she found a smiling young gentleman ready to talk German to her and answer questions, she was perfectly aware that she had only to close her hand and her victims would squeeze into any shape she liked.  She proposed to do this closing at the first moment of sheer intolerableness, and that moment seemed well reached when she entered Creeper Cottage and realized what the attic, the kitchen, and the pump really meant.

It is always a shock to find one’s self in the company of a worm that turns, always a shock and an amazement; a spectacle one never, somehow, gets used to.  But how dreadful does it become when one is in the power of the worm, and the worm is resentful, and ready to squeeze to any extent.  Fritzing reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite well have been left at home.  Quite well?  A thousand times better.  What had she done but whine during her passive period?  And now that she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the base-born, the empty-brained, was actually going to be able to ruin the plans of the noblest woman on earth.

Thus thought Fritzing, mopping his forehead.  Annalise had rushed away to her attic after flinging her defiance at him, her spirit ready to dare anything but her body too small, she felt, to risk staying within reach of a man who looked more like somebody who meant to shake her than any one she had ever seen.  Fritzing mopped his forehead, and mopped and mopped again.  He stood where she had left him, his eyes fixed on the ground, his distress so extreme that he was quite near crying.  What was he to do?  What was he to say to his Princess?  How was he to stop the girl’s going back to Kunitz?  How was he to stop her going even so far as young Morrison?  That she should tell young Morrison who Priscilla was would indeed be a terrible thing.  It would end their being able to live in Symford.  It would end their being able to live in England.