They caught the train neatly at Rühl. They only had to wait about the station for ten minutes before it came in. Hardly any one was there, and nobody took the least notice of them. Fritzing, after a careful look round to see if it contained people he knew, put the Princess into a second-class carriage labelled _Frauen_, and then respectfully withdrew to another part of the train. He had decided that second-class was safest. People in that country nearly always travel second-class, especially women,--at all times in such matters more economical than men; and a woman by herself in a first-class carriage would have been an object of surmise and curiosity at every station. Therefore Priscilla was put into the carriage labelled _Frauen_, and found herself for the first time in her life alone with what she had hitherto only heard alluded to vaguely as the public. She sat down in a corner with an odd feeling of surprise at being included in the category _Frauen_, and giving a swift timid glance through her veil at the public confronting her was relieved to find it consisted only of a comfortable mother and her child. I know not why the adjective comfortable should so invariably be descriptive of mothers in Germany. In England and France though you may be a mother, you yet, I believe, may be so without being comfortable. In Germany, somehow, you can't. Perhaps it is the climate; perhaps it is the food; perhaps it is simply want of soul, or that your soul does not burn with a fire sufficiently consuming. Anyhow it is so. This mother had all the good-nature that goes with amplitude. Being engaged in feeding her child with _belegte Brödchen_--that immensely satisfying form of sandwich--she at once offered Priscilla one. "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking into her corner. "Do take one, Fräulein," said the mother, persuasively. "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking. "On a journey it passes the time. Even if one is not hungry, thank God one can always eat. Do take one." "No thank you," said Priscilla. "Why does she wear that black thing over her face?" inquired the child. "Is she a witch?" "Silence, silence, little worthless one," cried the mother, delightedly stroking his face with half a _Brödchen_. "You see he is clever, Fräulein. He resembles his dear father as one egg does another." "Does he?" said Priscilla, immediately conceiving a prejudice against the father. "Why don't she take that black thing off?" said the child. "Hush, hush, small impudence. The Fräulein will take it off in a minute. The Fräulein has only just got in." "Mutti, is she a witch? Mutti, Mutti, is she a witch, Mutti?" The child, his eyes fixed anxiously on Priscilla's swathed head, began to whimper.