Philip heard the voices of the party outside the house, the crisp laughter of the girls, and the sawing tones of Mrs. Sidebottom, and then the sounds became distant, and ceased. His meditations were interrupted about a quarter of an hour later by three raps against the wall by his head. The several rooms in the inn were small, and divided from each other and from the passage by wood—not very thick deal boarding, papered over, but which in places had warped and split the paper. Signora Lombardi, every spring, with a pot of paste and some strips of paper, went about the rooms pasting over the rifts, disguising them, and preventing the partitions from being as diaphanous as they were diaphonous. German, Swiss and Italian beds are wooden boxes, narrow and short; and in such a bed against such a wall lay Philip, unable to move without torture.
Again three loud raps.
'Who is that?' he called.
'You are awake, Mr. Pennycomequick?' asked the voice of Miss Durham, almost in his ear. 'We are in adjoining stalls. I want a word with you, because I leave this insufferable place to-morrow, I can endure the cold and tedium no longer; and before you return to the nether world, I may be away unless you descend in a glissade, and shoot through the roof of the Hôtel Impérial upon us into the midst of the table at dinner.'
Philip felt the partition between them shake. She was laughing. She had her chair against it, and leaned against it—to speak to him and to laugh at him.
'I must ask your pardon,' she said presently with a twitter in her tones from suppressed merriment; 'I did not realize your danger, or rather the danger you had escaped, when pulled out of the snow. But my laughter was excusable; you can have no conception how infinitely comic an object you presented; and the whole affair was so ridiculous. You—going aloft after edelweiss without the smallest acquaintance with its habitat, and with no experience to teach you how to keep your footing in Alpine altitudes, and shooting down, pop! through a hole into the nether world. And then—to see the men about the hole extracting you—it was like Esquimaux fishing.'
Philip was not only vastly offended, but he was also greatly shocked, at the conduct of the young Chicago lady, holding a conversation with him through the wall when he was in bed. To show his sense of the indelicacy of her course, he said nothing in return.
She tapped again.
'Well, Mr. Pennycomequick! have I scandalized you? We are in the land of freedom; and I am a daughter of the Stars and Stripes, and we American girls are not so particular about trifles as are your English misses. Are you very much bruised and crumpled?'
'Very,' groaned Philip.