"Good heavens!" said Scott, flushing a deep red. "Spare me, Isabel!"
Dinah broke into her gay, infectious laugh. "Please—please don't be upset about it! I'm glad I'm one of the few. I've felt you were a prince in disguise all along."
"Very much in disguise!" protested Scott. "Remove that, and there would be nothing left."
"Except a man," said Isabel, "You can't get away, Stumpy. You're caught."
A fleeting smile crossed her face like a gleam of light and was gone. She turned her look upon Dinah, and became silent again.
Scott, much disconcerted, hunted in every pocket for his cigarette-case.
"You don't mind my smoking, I hope?" he murmured.
"I like it," said Dinah. "Let me help you light up!"
She made a screen with her hands, and guarded the flame from the draught.
He thanked her courteously, recovering his composure with a smile that was not without self-ridicule, and in a moment they were talking again upon impersonal matters. But the episode, slight though it was, dwelt in Dinah's mind thereafter with an odd persistence. She felt as if Isabel had given her a flashlight glimpse of something which otherwise she would scarcely have realized. In that single fleeting moment of revelation she had seen that which no vision of knight in shining armour could have surpassed.
They reached the châlet at the top of the pass, and descended for tea. The windows looked right down the snow-clad valley up which they had come. The sun had begun to sink, and the greater part of it lay in shadow.