CHAPTER X
ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.
The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of petulance.
“Isn't it too provoking!” cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last. “This is where we are now—according to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left, the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see, we might as well be at Redhill.”
“It is pretty hard luck,” Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. “But hang it all—it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and you'll see some Alps yet.”
“Where we're going,” the young man interposed, “the head-porter told me it was always cloudier than anywhere else.”
“I don't think that can be so,” Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his corner. “It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as all that.”
“The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland,” said the girl—“they would do anything.”
Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. “Well, you can comfort yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll stay here, all right,” he assured her. The young people smiled back at him, and with this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the opposite seat, lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more against the hard, red-plush cushion. Personally, he did not in the least resent the failure of the scenery.