Happy?  Can anybody who is supperless, dinnerless, breakfastless, be happy, Priscilla wondered?  But the question struck her as funny, and the vibrating tones in which it was asked struck her as rather funny too, and she opened her eyes for a moment to look up at Robin with a smile of amusement—­a smile that she could not guess was turned by the hunger within her into something wistful and tremulous.  “Yes,” said Priscilla in that strange pathetic voice, “I—­think so.”  And after a brief glance at him down went her weary eyelids again.

The next thing that happened was that Robin, who was trembling, kissed her hand.  This she let him do with perfect placidity.  Every German woman is used to having her hand kissed.  It is kissed on meeting, it is kissed on parting, it is kissed at a great many odd times in between; she holds it up mechanically when she comes across a male acquaintance; she is never surprised at the ceremony; the only thing that surprises her is if it is left out.  Priscilla then simply thought Robin was going.  “What a mercy,” she said to herself, glancing at him a moment through her eyelashes.  But Robin was not used to hand-kissing and saw things in a very different light.  He felt she made no attempt to draw her hand away, he heard her murmuring something inarticulate—­it was merely Good-bye—­he was hurled along to his doom; and stooping over her the unfortunate young man kissed her hair.

Priscilla opened her eyes suddenly and very wide.  I don’t know what folly he would have perpetrated next, or what sillinesses were on the tip of his tongue, or what meaning he still chose to read in her look, but an instant afterwards he was brought down for ever from the giddy heights of his illusions:  Priscilla boxed his ears.

I am sorry to have to record it.  It is always sweeter if a woman does not box ears.  The action is shrewish, benighted, mediaeval, nay, barbarous; and this box was a very hard one indeed, extraordinarily hard for so little a hand and so fasting a girl.  But we know she had twice already been on the verge of doing it; and the pent-up vigour of what the policeman had not got and what the mother in the train had not got was added I imagine to what Robin got.  Anyhow it was efficacious.  There was an exclamation—­I think of surprise, for surely a young man would not have minded the pain?—­and he put his hand up quickly to his face.  Priscilla got up just as quickly out of her chair and rang the handbell furiously, her eyes on his, her face ablaze.  Annalise must have thrown herself down the ladder, for they hardly seemed to have been standing there an instant face to face, their eyes on a level, he scarlet, she white, both deadly silent, before the maid was in the room.

“This person has insulted me,” said Priscilla, turning to her and pointing at Robin.  “He never comes here again.  Don’t let me find you forgetting that,” she added, frowning at the girl; for she remembered they had been seen talking eagerly together at the children’s treat.