walked up and down the deck in front of her as though she were not
there. One hurried passenger actually tripped over her feet, and
passed on with the briefest apology. Everywhere she saw indifferent
faces, indifferent, oblivious faces. It was simply glorious. And she
had had no trials since leaving Gerstein. There Fritzing had removed
her beyond the range of the mother's eyes, grown at last extremely
cold and piercing; Annalise, all meek anxiety to please, had put her
to bed in the sleeping-car of the Brussels express; and in the morning
her joy had been childish at having a little tray with bad coffee on
it thrust in by a busy attendant, who slammed it down on the table and
hurried out without so much as glancing at her. How delicious that
was. The Princess laughed with delight and drank the coffee, grits and
all. Oh, the blessed freedom 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