Fifthly, she was to be his daughter.

"Daughter?" cried Fritzing, bounding in his chair. "Your Grand Ducal
Highness forgets I have friends in England, every one of whom is aware
that I never had a wife."

"Niece, then," said Priscilla.

He gazed at her in silence, trying to imagine her his niece. He had
two sisters, and they had stopped exactly at the point they were at
when they helped him, barefoot, to watch Westphalian pigs. I do not
mean that they had not ultimately left the little farm, gone into
stockings, and married. It is their minds I am thinking of, and these
had never budged. They were like their father, a doomed dullard; while
Fritzing's mother, whom he resembled, had been a rather extraordinary
woman in a rough and barbarous way. He found himself wholly unable to
imagine either of his sisters the mother of this exquisite young lady.

These, then, baldly, were Priscilla's plans. The carrying of them out
was left, she informed him, altogether to Fritzing. After having spent
several anxious days, she told him, considering whether she ought to
dye her hair black in order to escape recognition, or stay her own
colour but disguise herself as a man and buy a golden beard, she had
decided that these were questions Fritzing would settle better than
she could. "I'd dye my hair at once," she said, "but what about my
wretched eyelashes? Can one dye eyelashes?"

Fritzing thought not, and anyhow was decidedly of opinion that her
eyelashes should not be tampered with; I think I have said that they