Helen, after her first eager outburst, was tongue tied. She saw that her would-be rescuers were dripping wet, and was amazed that Bower should greet them so curtly, though, to be sure, she believed implicitly that the storm would soon pass. Stampa was already inside the hut. He was haranguing Barth and the porter vehemently, and they were listening with a curious submissiveness.
Spencer was the most collected person present. He brushed aside Bower’s acrimony as lightly as he had accepted Helen’s embarrassed explanation. “This is not my hustle at all,” he said. “Stampa heard that his adored sigñorina——”
“Stampa! Is that Stampa?”
Bower’s strident voice was hushed to a hoarse murmur. It reminded one of his hearers of a growling dog suddenly cowed by fear. Helen’s ears were tuned to this perplexing note; but Spencer interpreted it according to his dislike of the man.
“Stampa heard,” he went on, with cold-drawn precision, “that Miss Wynton had gone to the Forno. He is by far the most experienced guide to be found on this side of the Alps, and he believes that anyone remaining up here to-day will surely be imprisoned in the hut a week or more by bad weather. In fact, even now an hour may make all the difference between danger and safety. Perhaps you can convince him he is wrong. I know nothing about it, beyond the evidence of my senses, backed up by some acquaintance with blizzards. Anyhow, I am inclined to think that Miss Wynton will be wise if she listens to the points of the argument in the hotel.”
“Perhaps it would be better to return at once,” said Helen timidly. Her sensitive nature warned her that these two men were ready to quarrel, and that she herself, in some nebulous way, was the cause of their mutual enmity.
Beyond this her intuition could not travel. It was impossible that she should realize how sorely her wish to placate Bower disquieted Spencer. He had seen the two under conditions that might, indeed, be explicable by Helen’s fright; but he would extend no such charitable consideration to Bower, whose conduct, no matter how it was viewed, made him a rival. Yes, it had come to that. Spencer had hardly spoken a word to Stampa during the toilsome journey from Maloja. He had looked facts stubbornly in the face, and the looking served to clear certain doubts from his heart and brain. He wanted to woo and win Helen for his wife. He was enmeshed in a net of his own contriving, and its strands were too strong to be broken. If Helen was reft from him now, he would gaze on a darkened world for many a day.
But he was endowed with a splendid self control. That element of cast steel in his composition, discovered by Dunston after five minutes’ acquaintance, kept him rigid under the strain.
“Sorry I should figure as spoiling your excursion, Miss Wynton,” he was able to say calmly; “but, when all is said and done, the weather is bad, and you will have plenty of fine days later.”