For some time after this Priscilla heard fevered walking about in her parlour and sounds as of many and muffled imprecations; then, when they had grown a little more intermittent, careful footsteps came up her stairs, footsteps so careful, so determined not to disturb, that the stairs cracked and wheezed more than they had ever yet been known to do. Arrived at the top they paused outside her door, and Priscilla, checking her sobs, could hear how Fritzing stood there wrestling with his body's determination to breathe too loud. He stood there listening for what seemed to her an eternity. She almost screamed at last as the minutes passed and she knew he was still there, motionless, listening. After a long while he went away again with the same anxious care to make no noise, and she, with a movement of utter abandonment to woe, turned over and cried herself sick. Till evening she lay there alone, and then the steps came up again, accompanied this time by the tinkle of china and spoons. Priscilla was sitting at the window looking on to the churchyard, staring into the dark with its swaying branches and few faint stars, and when she heard him outside the door listening again in anxious silence she got up and opened it. Fritzing held a plate of food in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. The expression on his face was absurdly like that of a mother yearning over a sick child. "_Mein liebes Kind_--_mein liebes Kind_," he stammered when she came out, so woebegone, so crushed, so utterly unlike any Priscilla of any one of her moods that he had ever seen before. Her eyes were red, her eyelids heavy with tears, her face was pinched and narrower, the corners of her mouth had a most piteous droop, her very hair, pushed back off her forehead, seemed sad, and hung in spiritless masses about her neck and ears. "_Mein liebes Kind_," stammered poor Fritzing; and his hand shook so that he upset some of the milk. Priscilla leaned against the door-post. She was feeling sick and giddy. "How dreadful this is," she murmured, looking at him with weary, woeful eyes. "No, no--all will be well," said Fritzing, striving to be brisk. "Drink some milk, ma'am." "Oh, I have been wicked." "Wicked?" Fritzing hastily put the plate and glass down on the floor, and catching up the hand hanging limply by her side passionately kissed it. "You are the noblest woman on earth," he said. "Oh," said Priscilla, turning away her head and shutting her eyes for very weariness of such futile phrases. "Ma'am, you are. I would swear it. But you are also a child, and so you are ready at the first reverse to suppose you have done with happiness for ever. Who knows," said Fritzing with a great show of bright belief in his own prophecy, the while his heart was a stone, "who knows but what you are now on the very threshold of it?" "Oh," murmured Priscilla, too beaten to do anything but droop her head.