of being insignificant.  It was as good, she thought, as getting rid of your body altogether and going about an invisible spirit.  She sat on the deck of the apparently motionless turbine and thought gleefully of past journeys, now for ever done with; of the grand ducal train, of herself drooping inside it as wearily as the inevitable bouquets drooping on the tables, of the crowds of starers on every platform, of the bowing officials wherever your eye chanced to turn.  The Countess Disthal, of course, had been always at her elbow, and when she had to go to the window and do the gracious her anxiety lest she should bestow one smile too few had only been surpassed by the Countess’s anxiety lest she should bestow one smile too many.  Well, that was done with now; as much done with as a nightmare, grisly staleness, is done with when you wake to a fair spring morning and the smell of dew.  And she had no fears.  She was sure, knowing him as she did, that when the Grand Duke found out she had run away he would make no attempt to fetch her back, but would simply draw a line through his remembrance of her, rub her out of his mind, (his heart, she knew, would need no rubbing, because she had never been in it,) and after the first fury was over, fury solely on account of the scandal, he would be as he had been before, while she—­oh wonderful new life!—­she would be born again to all the charities.

Now how can I, weak vessel whose only ballast is a cargo of interrogations past which life swirls with a thunder of derisively contradictory replies, pretend to say whether Priscilla ought to have had conscience-qualms or not?  Am I not deafened by the roar of answers, all seemingly so right yet all so different, that the simplest question brings?  And would not the answering roar to anything so complicated as a question about conscience-qualms deafen me for ever?  I shall leave the Princess, then, to run away from her home and her parent if she chooses, and make no effort to whitewash any part of her conduct that may seem black.  I shall chronicle, and not comment.  I shall try to, that is, for comments are very dear to me.  Indeed I see I cannot move on even now till I have pointed out that though Priscilla was getting as far as she could from the Grand Duke she was also getting as near as she could to the possession of her soul; and there are many persons who believe this to be a thing so precious that it is absolutely the one thing worth living for.

The crossing to Dover, then, was accomplished quite peacefully by Priscilla.  Not so, however, by Fritzing.  He, tormented man, chief target for the goddess’s darts, spent his time holding on to the rail along the turbine’s side in order to steady himself; and as there was a dead calm that day the reader will at once perceive that the tempest must have been inside Fritzing himself.  It was; and it had been raised to hurricane pitch by some snatches of the talk of two Englishmen he had heard as they paced up and down past where he was standing.