“Always are,” said Fordham. “It’s a place where people go to stay, and the same people go there again and again. Moreover, it isn’t enough of a show-place to attract the mere tourist. ’Arry itinerant patronises the higher resorts, where he can walk across a glacier and brag about it ever after. But this is an exceptionally weedy crowd, as Phil says,” he added, sticking up his eyeglass and taking stock of the same.
“Not all. I don’t think quite all,” objected Mrs Wyatt. “Those two ladies sitting next to the clergyman down there look rather nice. Don’t you think so, Mr Fordham?”
“Might discharge both barrels of a shot-gun down the table and not damage a social equal,” was the uncompromising reply.
But little it mattered to them in a general way what sort of a lot their fellow-countrymen there sojourning might or might not be. It was delightful to exchange the low stuffy salle-à-manger, with its inevitable reek of fleshpots, its clatter of knives and forks and its strife of tongues, for the sweet hay-scented evening air, with the afterglow reddening and fading on the double-horned Besso and the snowfields beyond, the stars twinkling forth one by one against the loom of the great mountain wall which seemed literally to overhang the valley. There was a lulling, soothing sense in the sequestered propinquity of the great mountains, in the dull roar of the ever-speaking torrent. Old General Wyatt, seated on a bench smoking his evening pipe, expressed unbounded satisfaction.
“It’s like a paradise after that abominably rackety Grindelwald,” he pronounced.
“Yes, dear,” assented his wife. “But what I want to know is,” she added in a low tone, “how is that going to end?”
“How is what?—Oh—ah—yes—um!” as he followed her glance.
The latter had lighted upon their niece and her now inseparable escort. They had returned from an evening stroll, and were standing looking about them as though loth to go in. Alma had thrown on a cloak, for there was a touch of sharpness in the air, and the soft fur seemed to cling caressingly round the lower part of her face, framing and throwing into greater prominence the luminous eyes and sweet, refined beauty. She was discoursing animatedly, but the old people were too far off for the burden of her ideas to reach them.
“It is going to end in the child completely knocking herself up,” said the General with a disapproving shake of the head. “She must have walked twenty miles to-day if she has walked one. Now mind, she must stay at home to-morrow and rest thoroughly.”
“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it isn’t,” urged the old lady in a vexed tone.