Death was, thought Priscilla, looking from the picture to the figure on the bed. She sighed a little, and got up. Life lay before her, an endless ladder up each of whose steep rungs she would have to clamber; in every sort of weather she would have to clamber, getting more battered, more blistered with every rung.... She looked wistfully at the figure on the bed, and sighed a little. Then she crept out, and softly shut the door. She walked home lost in thought. As she was going up the hill to her cottage Fritzing suddenly emerged from it and indulged in movements so strange and complicated that they looked like nothing less than a desperate dancing on the doorstep. Priscilla walked faster, staring in astonishment. He made strange gestures, his face was pale, his hair rubbed up into a kind of infuriated mop. "Why, what in the world--" began the amazed Priscilla, as soon as she was near enough. "Ma'am, I've been robbed," shouted Fritzing; and all Symford might have heard if it had happened to be listening. "Robbed?" repeated Priscilla. "What of?" "Of all my money, ma'am. Of all I had--of all we had--to live on." "Nonsense, Fritzi," said Priscilla; but she did turn a little paler. "Don't let us stand out here," she added; and she got him in and shut the street door. He would have left it open and would have shouted his woes through it as through a trumpet down the street, oblivious of all things under heaven but his misfortune. He tore open the drawer of the writing-table. "In this drawer--in the pocket-book you see in this drawer--in this now empty pocket-book, did I leave it. It was there yesterday. It was there last night. Now it is gone. Miscreants from without have visited us. Or perhaps, viler still, miscreants from within. A miscreant, I do believe, capable of anything--Annalise--" "Fritzi, I took a five-pound note out of that last night, if that's what you miss." "You, ma'am?" "To pay the girl who worked here her wages. You weren't here. I couldn't find anything smaller." "_Gott sei Dank! Gott sei Dank_!" cried Fritzing, going back to German in his joy. "Oh ma'am, if you had told me earlier you would have spared me great anguish. Have you the change?" "Didn't she bring it?" "Bring it, ma'am?" "I gave it to her last night to change. She was to bring it round this morning. Didn't she?" Fritzing stared aghast. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. In a moment he was back again. "She has not been here," he said, in a voice packed once more with torment. "Perhaps she has forgotten." "Ma'am, how came you--" "Now you're going to scold me." "No, no--but how is it possible that you should have trusted--" "Fritzi, you _are_ going to scold me, and I'm so tired. What else has been taken? You said all your money--" He snatched up his hat. "Nothing else, ma'am, nothing else. I will go and seek the girl." And he clapped it down over his eyes as he always did in moments of great mental stress.