“Yet where can one go and avoid fate? Or where, let me ask you, Abel, can we travel and not meet an American tourist?
“You remember the day and the place of our first meeting. It was on a glorious afternoon in July, when the sun was sinking in the west and kindling all the horizon into a conflagration. We were in a little chalet at the foot of the mountain. We had come out to view the magnificence of the sunset. The cowherd was penning his cattle; the shepherd was folding his sheep.
“Coming down the mountain path we saw a solitary tourist, knapsack on back and alpenstock in hand.
“That was my first sight of you, Abel; a tall, athletic, black-bearded man, whom we all first took for a Tyrolesian.
“You came up to the door of the chalet, raised your hat to us and asked the cottagers if you could have a night’s lodging.
“Do you remember, Abel? Of course you could be accommodated—roughly; we were all ‘roughing it’ for the time being.
“So our acquaintance began.
“That night you introduced yourself to us by name and nationality—Abel Force, of Maryland, United States; and when my father, in return, named himself and me your face brightened. You told him that on leaving America you had brought letters of introduction—among which was one from your late minister to St. James, addressed to the Earl of Enderby. These letters were all with your luggage at your hotel at Berne, where you had left them to come on this pedestrian excursion to the mountain. You added that you had missed Lord Enderby in England and learned that he was traveling on the Continent; that you deemed yourself strangely fortunate in having thus met him, and would present your credentials in the form of the ex-minister’s letter, as soon as we should reach Berne.
“The next day we all returned to Berne in company—you, at my father’s invitation, taking a seat in our carriage.
“At the Bernerhof Hotel we stopped but one night. There you found and presented your letter—to prove that you were no impostor, you said. You joined our company and traveled where we traveled, and stopped where we stopped.