He nodded.
“I’ll go and order some grub—and book rooms.” He paused uncertainly. “By the way, I’ll have to enter our names in the hotel register, I suppose?”
“Our names?” Ann flushed nervously. “Oh, you can’t—I mean—”
“Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “I shan’t enter us under our own names, of course. What do you say to Smith—nice, inoffensive sort of name, don’t you think? ‘G. Smith and sister’—I think that’ll meet the necessities of the case.”
Ann giggled suddenly.
“It’s all rather funny if it wasn’t so—so—”
“Improper,” supplied Tony obligingly.
“Call it unconventional,” she supplemented. “It sounds better. And now do go and order some food for ‘G. Smith and sister.’ Sister is literally starving.”
Half an hour later they were light-heartedly demolishing an excellent dinner, and the manager of the Hotel de Loup was congratulating himself upon the acquisition of two unexpected guests during the slack season. Afterwards they made another pilgrimage up to the Roche d’Or to watch the sunset.
When they had reached the top, Ann stood quietly at Tony’s side, not speaking. The wonderful beauty of the scene enthralled her, and words would have seemed almost a profanation, breaking across the deep, stirless silence which wrapped them round. Away to their right the golden disc of the sun was sinking royally westward, bathing the mountains in a flood of lambent light, and piercing the darkening blue of the sky with quivering shafts of scarlet and orange and saffron. Across the snow-fields shimmered a translucent rosy glow, so that they seemed no longer bleak and desolate, but lay spread like an unfurled banner of glory betwixt the great peaks which sentinelled them round. Presently the sun dipped below the rim of the horizon, and the splendour faded swiftly. It was as if some one had suddenly closed the doors of an opened heaven, shutting away the brief vision of its radiance.