"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.
"That child should be in bed," said Priscilla, with a severity born of her anxiety lest, to calm him, humanity should force her to put up her veil. "Persons who are as intelligent as that should never be in trains at night. Their brains cannot bear it. Would he not be happier if he lay down and went to sleep?"
"Yes, yes; that is what I have been telling him ever since we left Kunitz"—Priscilla shivered—"but he will not go. Dost thou hear what the Fräulein says, Hans-Joachim?"
"Why don't she take that black thing off?" whimpered the child.
But how could the poor Princess, however anxious to be kind, take off her veil and show her well-known face to this probable inhabitant of Kunitz?
"Do take it off, Fräulein," begged the mother, seeing she made no preparations to do so. "When he gets ideas into his head there is never peace till he has what he wants. He does remind me so much of his father."
"Did you ever," said Priscilla, temporizing, "try him with a little—just a little slap? Only a little one," she added hastily, for the mother looked at her oddly, "only as a sort of counter-irritant. And it needn't be really hard, you know—"
"Ach, she's a witch—Mutti, she's a witch!" shrieked the child, flinging his face, butter and all, at these portentous words, into his mother's lap.