It had belonged to her grandmother, and money could not pay for it; neither could the long, handsome, gilt-framed mirror which came to her within a week from Pondy quite replace it. But it did a good deal towards it. He had been profuse in his apologies, and his companions had denounced him to her as a fool and idiot, with whom they were through. And she had agreed with them until the expensive mirror came, when she weakened a little in his favor, saying she presumed it did not take as much to affect him as it did the others. He was a small man, and very little would upset him. It was a great shock to her to know that Warner’s Safe Cure was wine, and that Harry had helped to drink it, and nothing but his promise to sign the pledge availed to comfort her. He stayed at home two or three weeks after his house party, and seemed most of the time to be in a brown study. No reference was made by either Kenneth or himself to Connie until the day before he started for Boston. Then he asked, with apparent indifference: “By the way, Ken, do you know where that girl is whose health that puppy drank?”

“You mean Connie?” Kenneth said; and Hal replied, “Yes, Connie Elliott. Is she still abroad?”

Kenneth supposed so, although they rarely heard from her.

“She is quite an heiress, isn’t she?” was Harry’s next question.

“She will be if the mine in which she has a good deal of stock begins to pay, as it may,” Kenneth replied, and there the conversation ended, and the next day Harry left for Boston, telling his aunt he was going to buckle down to hard work and make something of himself, and some money, too, which he needed badly.

CHAPTER X
AT INTERLAKEN

It was just a year after the blow-out, and near the close of a lovely afternoon among the Alps, whose tall peaks cut the sky like needles in some points and again spread out in a broad snow-clad surface, glistening in the sunshine like flames of fire, and shining like a sea of glass. Along the mountain road which leads from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen two young people were slowly walking. They had been out for two or three miles, and were returning to the little village over which the Jungfrau keeps watch. They had turned aside from the principal thoroughfare into a circuitous path by the side of a brook which, fed by the glaciers above, went rippling over stones with a musical sound, very soothing in that quiet spot and at that hour of the day. Behind them as they walked was the great mountain which greets you at so many points in Switzerland, and nowhere more cheerily than in the vicinity of Interlaken. Before them were the roofs of the town, while across the fields came the tinkle of the cow bells and faintly in the distance was the echo of an Alpine horn, blown for the benefit of some tourists. It was just the hour and place for love making, and that something of this kind was in progress was evident in the faces of the young couple. He was a handsome young man, with dark hair and eyes, and a voice and smile which seldom failed to win the hearts of strangers. The girl was like a lovely flower, tall and slender, blue eyed and fair, but with a troubled look upon her face and in her eyes, on whose long lashes tears were standing. There had been a pause in their walk just where the brook made a dash over a pile of rocks and fell with a splash into the basin below. Here on a huge bowlder they sat and exchanged vows the nature of which the girl did not understand, except that they bound her to the man who had power to thrill her every nerve and make her as clay in his hands.

Connie, for it was she, had seen much of the world in one way, but was still a child in another, trusting with her whole soul where she trusted and seeing no fault in those she loved. Her close convent life had kept her ignorant of many things it might have been well for her to know. For a year or more she had been free from the restraint of school and had travelled from place to place with her aunt, doing everywhere the same thing,—a little sight-seeing, a good deal of shopping, and driving, dressing for table-d’hôte, where she met the same people night after night and heard the same flow of gossip. Told repeatedly how beautiful she was, sought in marriage, by some whose advances she felt to be an insult, and flattered by all till she was tired of it and longed for some quiet place where there was no sham and everything was real. Many times her thoughts had turned to the farmhouse with a longing to go there again, and her heart always beat faster when she recalled the moonlit evening when she sat with Kenneth on the stone wall and said things to him she would scarcely dare say now that she was older. That she did not hear from the Stannards often was her own fault, for her letters were always promptly answered. She had been so busy in school and since, and she disliked letter writing.

She was nearly twenty-two and her own mistress now, with no need to call upon the deacon and no necessity for writing, except for friendship’s sake. But somehow the farmhouse and its inmates, and especially Kenneth, were very distinct in her mind as she walked with this young man, who held her hand as if he had a right to it, and was not spurned as Pondy had been when he touched it in the diligence. He had come into her life at Lucerne, just when she was sick of everything and disgusted with a persistent offer of marriage from a sleepy-eyed Count Costello, many years her senior. She disliked him and was glad when a new comer, over whom the young girls in the hotel were raving, sought her from all the rest. From the first her aunt, who favored Costello and a title, had set her face against him, but it did not matter. Love’s fire was kindled and the light and warmth were very sweet to the trusting, innocent girl. Her lover had followed her to Interlaken, where their acquaintance ripened fast, and they were taking their last walk together, for early the next morning he was to leave for Paris, where friends were awaiting him.

“Remember,” he said, as they neared the hotel, “it is till death do us part.”