The wind ran up the valley with a sound like a flying train. Neither of them spoke while the gust lasted. It fell as suddenly as it came, and the valley shrank back into its pall of silence.
It was so solitary that it seemed to Lionel as if, at times, it might easily have no existence.
Lionel walked a little in front of Winn; the snow was soft and made heavy going. At the corner of the valley he turned to wait for Winn, and then he remembered the fanciful legend of New Year’s eve, for he saw Winn’s face very set and white, and his eyes looked as if the presence of death was in them — turned toward Davos.
CHAPTER XVII
Winn was under the impression that he could stand two or three days, especially if he had something practical to do. What helped him was the condition of Mr. Bouncing. Mr. Bouncing had suddenly retired. He had a bedroom on the other side of Winn’s, and a sitting-room connected it with his wife’s; but Mrs. Bouncing failed increasingly to take much advantage of this connection. Her theory was that, once you were in bed, you were better left alone.
Mr. Bouncing refused to have a nurse; he said they were disagreeable women who wouldn’t let you take your own temperature. This might have seemed to involve the services of Mrs. Bouncing; but they were taken up for the moment by a bridge drive.
“People do seem to want me so!” she explained plaintively to Winn in the corridor. “And I have a feeling, you know, Major Staines, that in a hotel like this it’s one’s duty to make things go.”
“Some things go without much making,” said Winn, significantly. He was under the impression that one of these things was Mr. Bouncing.
Winn made it his business, since it appeared to be nobody else’s, to keep an eye on Mr. Bouncing: in the daytime he sat with him and ran his errands; at night he came in once or twice and heated things for Mr. Bouncing on a spirit lamp.
Mr. Bouncing gave him minute directions, and scolded him for leaving milk exposed to the menaces of the air and doing dangerous things with a teaspoon. Nevertheless, he valued Winn’s company.