not invested, and Priscilla had drawn her loose cash from
the Kunitz bank; but what he took hidden in his gaiters after paying
for Priscilla's outfit and bribing Annalise was not more than three
hundred pounds; and what is three hundred pounds to a person who buys
and furnishes cottages and scatters five-pound notes among the poor?
The cottages were paid for. He had insisted on doing that at once,
chiefly in order to close his dealings with Mr. Dawson; but Mr. Dawson
had not let them go for less than a hundred and fifty for the two, in
spite of Tussie's having said a hundred was enough. When Fritzing told
Mr. Dawson what Tussie had said Mr. Dawson soon proved that Tussie
could not possibly have meant it; and Fritzing, knowing how rich
Priscilla really was and what vast savings he had himself lying over
in Germany in comfortable securities, paid him without arguing and
hastened from the hated presence. Then the journey for the three from
Kunitz had been expensive; the stay at Baker's Farm had been, strange
to say, expensive; Mrs. Jones's comforting had been expensive; the
village mothers had twice emptied Priscilla's purse of ten pounds; and
the treat to the Symford children had not been cheap. After paying for
this--the Minehead confectioner turned out to be a man of little faith
in unknown foreigners, and insisted on being paid at once--Fritzing
had about forty pounds left. This, he had thought, would do for food
and lights and things for a long while,--certainly till he had hit on
a plan by which he would be able to get hold of the Princess's money
and his own without betraying where they were; and here on his table,
the second unpleasant surprise that greeted him on entering his new
home (the first had been his late master's dreadful smile) was the
bill for the furnishing of it. To a man possessed of only forty pounds
any bill will seem tremendous. This one was for nearly two hundred;
and at the end of the long list of items, the biggest of which was
that bathroom without water that had sent Annalise out on strike, was
the information that a remittance would oblige. A remittance! Poor
Fritzing. He crushed the paper in his hand and made caustic mental
comments on the indecency of these people, clamouring for their money
almost before the last workman was out of the place, certainly before
the smell of paint was out of it, and clamouring, too, in the face of
the Shuttleworth countenance and support. He had not been a we