“I never”—­began Robin.

“Will you go?”

Annalise opened the door for him.  He went out, and she shut it behind him.  Then she walked sedately across the room again, looking sideways at the Princess, who took no notice of her but stood motionless by the table gazing straight before her, her lips compressed, her face set in a kind of frozen white rage, and having got into the bathroom Annalise began to run.  She ran out at the back door, in again at Fritzing’s back door, out at his front door into the street, and caught up Robin as he was turning down the lane to the vicarage.  “What have you done?” she asked him breathlessly, in German.

“Done?” Robin threw back his head and laughed quite loud.

“Sh—­sh,” said Annalise, glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.

“Done?” said Robin, subduing his bitter mirth.  “What do you suppose I’ve done?  I’ve done what any man would have in my place—­encouraged, almost asked to do it.  I kissed your young lady, liebes Fraeulein, and she pretended not to like it.  Now isn’t that what a sensible girl like you would call absurd?”

But Annalise started back from the hand he held out to her in genuine horror.  “What?” she cried, “What?”

“What?  What?” mocked Robin.  “Well then, what?  Are you all such prudes in Germany?  Even you pretending, you little hypocrite?”

“Oh,” cried Annalise hysterically, pushing him away with both her hands, “what have you done? Elender Junge, what have you done?”

“I think you must all be mad,” said Robin angrily.  “You can’t persuade me that nobody ever kisses anybody over in Germany.”

“Oh yes they do—­oh yes they do,” cried Annalise, wringing her hands, “but neither there nor anywhere else—­in England, anywhere in the world—­do the sons of pastors—­the sons of pastors—­” She seemed to struggle for breath, and twisted and untwisted her apron round her hands in a storm of agitation while Robin, utterly astonished, stared at her—­“Neither there nor anywhere else do they—­the sons of pastors—­kiss—­kiss royal princesses.”

It was now Robin’s turn to say “What?”

XVI

He went up to Cambridge the next morning.  Term had not begun, but he went; a Robin with all the briskness gone out of him, and if still with something of the bird left only of a bird that is moulting.  His father was mildly surprised, but applauded the apparent desire for solitary study.  His mother was violently surprised, and tried hard to get at his true reasons.  She saw with the piercing eye of a relation—­that eye from which hardly anything can ever be hidden—­that something had happened and that the something was sobering and unpleasant.  She could not imagine what it was, for she did not know he had been to Creeper Cottage the night before and all the afternoon and at dinner he had talked and behaved as usual.  Now he did not talk at all, and his behaviour was limited to a hasty packing of portmanteaus.  Determined to question him she called him into the study just before he started, and shut the door.