"No," said Fenella. Maidenly dignity relented a little. It sounded "fun."
Sir Bryan gave a boyish laugh.
"You've missed half your life," said he, making use of one of a collection of phrases he had brought from over the Atlantic. "Look here!" He touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder and pointed across the park. "From the Belvedere down to the 'ha-ha' there's two hundred and fifty yards if you know how. We laid it out years ago, and marked it with stones. It's known all round. Lots of people, probably, will turn up here this afternoon. You'll let me take you down, won't you, Miss Barbour? I say; do I have to go on calling you 'Miss Barbour'?"
"Yes," demurely; "I think it's best."
"For how long?"
She faced him with her hand upon the sash of the long French window. If it was "just flirting," Fenella was "all there."
"Until you've told me truthfully what Mr. Dollfus said."
"I'll do it while we're sleighing. It won't take ten minutes."
The conversation, however, lasted more than ten minutes, and it was one Fenella was never to forget. As Bryan had prophesied, the news that the slide was being banked and made spread rapidly, and a host of people turned up in the afternoon, in country carts with sledges trailing and bumping behind, or in motor-cars, with an occasional pair of skis sticking up in the air. The run had been laid out years ago under Lumsden's own direction, when "crooked run" tobogganing was a newly discovered rapture. More than one future hero of the Kloster or Cresta had taken his first powdery tumble, amid ecstatic laughter from friends and relations, on the snowy slopes of Freres Lulford, and even now, after the sophistication had set in that so quickly reduces any English pastime to a science, with its canting vocabulary and inner circle of the expert, whenever snow fell thickly enough to stop shooting and hunting, two or three days' sleighing in Lulford Park was thought rather "sport" by a society watchfully anxious never to be thrown upon its intellectual resources by any trick of wind or weather.