"I know. You're going to say why not eat? It does seem simple. But you've no idea how difficult it really is. I'm afraid my uncle and I have rather heaps to learn. We forgot to get a cook."
"A cook? But I thought—I understood that curtseying maid of yours was going to do all that?"
"So did I. So did he. But she won't."
Priscilla flushed, for since Tussie left after tea she had had grievous surprises, of a kind that made her first indignant and then inclined to wince. Fritzing had not been able to hide from her that Annalise had rebelled and refused to cook, and Priscilla had not been able to follow her immediate impulse and dismiss her. It was at this point, when she realized this, that the wincing began. She felt perfectly sick at the thought, flashed upon her for the first time, that she was in the power of a servant.
"Do you mean to say," said Tussie in a voice hollow with consternation, "that you've had no dinner?"
"Dinner? In a cottage? Why of course there was no dinner. There never will be any dinner—at night, at least. But the tragic thing is there was no supper. We didn't think of it till we began to get hungry. Annalise began first. She got hungry at six o'clock, and said something to Fritz—my uncle about it, but he wasn't hungry himself then and so he snubbed her. Now he is hungry himself, and he's gone out to see if he can't find a cook. It's very stupid. There's nothing in the house. Annalise ate the bread and things she found. She's upstairs now, crying." And Priscilla's lips twitched as she looked at Tussie's concerned face, and she began to laugh.
He seized his hat. "I'll go and get you something," he said, dashing at the door.
"I can't think what, at this time of the night. The only shop shuts at seven."
"I'll make them open it."
"They go to bed at nine."