Priscilla did not move and did not offer to shake hands, so he stood on the hearthrug and spread out his own to the blaze, looking down at her with bright, audacious eyes.  He thought he had not yet seen her so beautiful.  There was an extraordinary depth and mystery in her look, he thought, as it rested for a moment on his face, and she had never yet dropped her eyelashes as she now did when her eyes met his.  We know she was very hungry, and there was no strength in her at all.  Not only did her eyelashes drop, but her head as well, and her hands hung helplessly, like drooping white flowers, one over each arm of the chair.

“I came in to ask Mr. Neumann-Schultz if there’s anything I can do for you,” said Robin.

“Did you?  He lives next door.”

“I know.  I knocked there first, but he didn’t answer so I thought he must be here.”

Priscilla said nothing.  At any other time she would have snubbed Robin and got rid of him.  Now she merely sat and drooped.

“Has he gone out?”

“Yes.”

Her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper.  Those who know the faintness of hunger at this stage will also know the pathos that steals into the voice of the sufferer when he is unwillingly made to speak; it becomes plaintive, melodious with yearning, the yearning for food.  But if you do not know this, if you have yourself just come from dinner, if you are half in love and want the other person to be quite in love, if you are full of faith in your own fascinations, you are apt to fall into Robin’s error and mistake the nature of the yearning.  Tussie in Robin’s place would have doubted the evidence of his senses, but then Tussie was very modest.  Robin doubted nothing.  He saw, he heard, and he thrilled; and underneath his thrilling, which was real enough to make him flush to the roots of his hair, far down underneath it was the swift contemptuous comment, “They’re all alike.”

Priscilla shut her eyes.  She was listening for the first sound of Tussie’s or Fritzing’s footfall, the glad sound heralding the approach of something to eat, and wishing Robin would go away.  He was kind at times and obliging, but on the whole a nuisance.  It was a great pity there were so many people in the world who were nuisances and did not know it.  Somebody ought to tell them,—­their mothers, or other useful persons of that sort.  She vaguely decided that the next time she met Robin and was strengthened properly by food she would say a few things to him from which recovery would take a long while.

“Are you—­not well?” Robin asked, after a silence during which his eyes never left her and hers were shut; and even to himself his voice sounded deeper, more intense than usual.

“Oh yes,” murmured Priscilla with a little sigh.

“Are you—­happy?”