The Grand Duke would be after them, and there would have to be another flight to another country, another start there, another search for a home, another set of explanations, pretences, fears, lies,—­things of which he was so weary.  But there was something else, something worse than any of these things, that made Fritzing mop his forehead with so extreme a desperation:  Annalise had demanded the money due to her, and Fritzing had no money.

I am afraid Fritzing was never meant for a conspirator.  Nature never meant him to be a plotter, an arranger of unpleasant surprises for parents.  She never meant him to run away.  She meant him, probably, to spend his days communing with the past in a lofty room with distempered walls and busts round them.  That he should be forced to act, to decide, to be artful, to wrangle with maids, to make ends meet, to squeeze his long frame and explosive disposition into a Creeper Cottage where only an ill-fitting door separated him from the noise and fumes of the kitchen, was surely a cruel trick of Fate, and not less cruel because he had brought it on himself.  That he should have thought he could run away as well as any man is merely a proof of his singleness of soul.  A man who does that successfully is always, among a great many other things, a man who takes plenty of money with him and knows exactly where to put his hand on more when it is wanted.  Fritzing had thought it better to get away quickly with little money than to wait and get away with more.  He had seized all he could of his own that was not invested, and Priscilla had drawn her loose cash from the Kunitz bank; but what he took hidden in his gaiters after paying for Priscilla’s outfit and bribing Annalise was not more than three hundred pounds; and what is three hundred pounds to a person who buys and furnishes cottages and scatters five-pound notes among the poor?  The cottages were paid for.  He had insisted on doing that at once, chiefly in order to close his dealings with Mr. Dawson; but Mr. Dawson had not let them go for less than a hundred and fifty for the two, in spite of Tussie’s having said a hundred was enough.  When Fritzing told Mr. Dawson what Tussie had said Mr. Dawson soon proved that Tussie could not possibly have meant it; and Fritzing, knowing how rich Priscilla really was and what vast savings he had himself lying over in Germany in comfortable securities, paid him without arguing and hastened from the hated presence.  Then the journey for the three from Kunitz had been expensive; the stay at Baker’s Farm had been, strange to say, expensive; Mrs. Jones’s comforting had been expensive; the village mothers had twice emptied Priscilla’s purse of ten pounds; and the treat to the Symford children had not been cheap.  After paying for this—­the Minehead confectioner turned out to be a man of little faith in unknown foreigners, and insisted on being paid at once—­Fritzing had about forty pounds left.  This, he had thought, would do for food and lights