The
Silent Barrier

BY

LOUIS TRACY

AUTHOR OF
CYNTHIA’S CHAUFFEUR, A SON OF THE
IMMORTALS, THE WINGS OF THE MORNING, ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

J. V. MCFALL

Page decorations by A. W. PARSONS from
photographs by THE ENGADINE PRESS

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1908, 1911, by
EDWARD J. CLODE

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

“Spare me one moment, Miss Wynton,” he said. Frontispiece

CONTENTS

Ich muss—Das ist die Schrank, in welcher mich die Welt Von einer, die Natur von andrer Seite hält.

Fr. Rückert: Die Weisheit des Brahmenen.

[I must—That is the Barrier within which I am pent by the World on the one hand and Nature on the other.]

THE SILENT BARRIER

CHAPTER I

THE WISH

“

Mail in?”

“Yes, sir; just arrived. What name?”

“Charles K. Spencer.”

The letter clerk seized a batch of correspondence and sorted it with nimble fingers. The form of the question told him that Spencer was interested in letters stamped for the greater part with bland presentments of bygone Presidents of the United States. In any event, he would have known, by long experience of the type, that the well dressed, straight limbed, strong faced young man on the other side of the counter was an American. He withdrew four missives from the bundle. His quick eyes saw that three bore the Denver postmark, and the fourth hailed from Leadville.

“That is all at present, sir,” he said. “Would you like your mail sent to your room in future, or shall I keep it here?”

“Right here, please, in No. 20 slot. I could receive a reply by cable while I was going and coming along my corridor.”

The clerk smiled deferentially. He appreciated not only the length of the corridor, but the price paid by the tenant of a second floor suite overlooking the river.

“Very well, sir,” he said, glancing again at Spencer, “I will attend to it;” and he took a mental portrait of the man who could afford to hire apartments that ranked among the most expensive in the hotel. Obviously, the American was a recent arrival. His suite had been vacated by a Frankfort banker only three days earlier, and this was the first time he had asked for letters. Even the disillusioned official was amused by the difference between the two latest occupants of No. 20,—Herr Bamberger, a tub of a man, bald headed and bespectacled, and this alert, sinewy youngster, with the cleancut features of a Greek statue, and the brilliant, deep set, earnest eyes of one to whom thought and action were alike familiar.

Spencer, fully aware that he was posing for a necessary picture, examined the dates on his letters, nipped the end off a green cigar, helped himself to a match from a box tendered by a watchful boy, crossed the entrance hall, and descended a few steps leading to the inner foyer and restaurant. At the foot of the stairs he looked about for a quiet corner. The luncheon hour was almost ended. Groups of smokers and coffee drinkers were scattered throughout the larger room, which widened out below a second short flight of carpeted steps. The smaller anteroom in which he stood was empty, save for a few people passing that way from the restaurant, and he decided that a nook near a palm shaded balcony offered the retreat he sought.

He little dreamed that he was choosing the starting point of the most thrilling adventure in a life already adventurous; that the soft carpet of the Embankment Hotel might waft him to scenes not within the common scope. That is ever the way of true romance. Your knight errant may wander in the forest for a day or a year,—he never knows the moment when the enchanted glade shall open before his eyes; nay, he scarce has seen the weeping maiden bound to a tree ere he is called in to couch his lance and ride a-tilt at the fire breathing dragon. It was so when men and maids dwelt in a young world; it is so now; and it will be so till the crack of doom. Manners may change, and costume; but hearts filled with the wine of life are not to be altered. They are fashioned that way, and the world does not vary, else Eve might regain Paradise, and all the fret and fume have an end.

Charles K. Spencer, then, would certainly have been the most astonished, though perhaps the most self possessed, man in London had some guardian sprite whispered low in his ear what strange hazard lay in his choice of a chair. If such whisper were vouchsafed to him he paid no heed. Perhaps his occupancy of that particular corner was preordained. It was inviting, secluded, an upholstered backwash in the stream of fashion; so he sat there, nearly stunned a waiter by asking for a glass of water, and composed himself to read his letters.

The waiter hesitated. He was a Frenchman, and feared he had not heard aright.

“What sort of water, sir,” he asked,—“Vichy, St. Galmier, Apollinaris?”

Spencer looked up. He thought the man had gone. “No, none of those,” he said. “Just plain, unemotional water,—eau naturelle,—straight from the pipe,—the microbe laden fluid that runs off London tiles most days. I haven’t been outside the hotel during the last hour; but if you happen to pass the door I guess you’ll see the kind of essence I mean dripping off umbrellas. If you don’t keep it in the house, try to borrow a policeman’s cape and shoot a quart into a decanter.”

The quelled waiter hurried away and brought a carafe. Spencer professed to be so pleased with his rare intelligence that he gave him a shilling. Then he opened the envelop with the Leadville postmark. It contained a draft for 205 pounds, 15 shillings, 11 pence, and the accompanying letter from a firm of solicitors showed that the remittance of a thousand dollars was the moiety of the proceeds of a clean-up on certain tailings taken over by the purchasers of the Battle Mountain tunnel. The sum was not a large one; but it seemed to give its recipient such satisfaction that the movement of chairs on the floor of the big room just beneath failed to draw his attention from the lawyer’s statement.

A woman’s languid, well bred voice broke in on this apparently pleasant reverie.

“Shall we sit here, Helen?”

“Anywhere you like, dear. It is all the same to me. Thanks to you, I am passing an afternoon in wonderland. I find my surroundings so novel and entertaining that I should still be excited if you were to put me in the refrigerator.”

The eager vivacity of the second speaker—the note of undiluted and almost childlike glee with which she acknowledged that a visit to a luxurious hotel was a red letter day in her life—caused the man to glance at the two young women who had unconsciously disturbed him. Evidently, they had just risen from luncheon in the restaurant, and meant to dispose themselves for a chat. It was equally clear that each word they uttered in an ordinary conversational tone must be audible to him. They were appropriating chairs which would place the plumes of their hats within a few inches of his feet. When seated, their faces would be hidden from him, save for a possible glimpse of a profile as one or other turned toward her companion. But for a few seconds he had a good view of both, and he was young enough to find the scrutiny to his liking.

At the first glance, the girl who was acting as hostess might be deemed the more attractive of the pair. She was tall, slender, charmingly dressed, and carried herself with an assured elegance that hinted of the stage. Spencer caught a glint of corn flower blue eyes beneath long lashes, and a woman would have deduced from their color the correct explanation of a blue sunshade, a blue straw hat, and a light cape of Myosotis blue silk that fell from shapely shoulders over a white lace gown.

The other girl,—she who answered to the name of Helen,—though nearly as tall and quite as graceful, was robed so simply in muslin that she might have provided an intentional contrast. In the man’s esteem she lost nothing thereby. He appraised her by the fine contour of her oval face, the wealth of glossy brown hair that clustered under her hat, and the gleam of white teeth between lips of healthy redness. Again, had he looked through a woman’s eyes, he would have seen how the difference between Bond-st. and Kilburn as shopping centers might be sharply accentuated. But that distinction did not trouble him. Beneath a cold exterior he had an artist’s soul, and “Helen” met an ideal.

“Pretty as a peach!” he said to himself, and he continued to gaze at her. Indeed, for an instant he forgot himself, and it was not until she spoke again that he realized how utterly oblivious were both girls of his nearness.

“I suppose everybody who comes here is very rich,” was her rather awe-stricken comment.

Her companion laughed. “How nice of you to put it that way! It makes me feel quite important. I lunch or dine or sup here often, and the direct inference is that I am rolling in wealth.”

“Well, dear, you earn a great deal of money——”

“I get twenty pounds a week, and this frock I am wearing cost twenty-five. Really, Helen, you are the sweetest little goose I ever met. You live in London, but are not of it. You haven’t grasped the first principle of social existence. If I dressed within my means, and never spent a sovereign until it was in my purse, I should not even earn the sovereign. I simply must mix with this crowd whether I can afford it or not.”

“But surely you are paid for your art, not as a mannikin. You are almost in the front rank of musical comedy. I have seen you occasionally at the theater, and I thought you were the best dancer in the company.”

“What about my singing?”

“You have a very agreeable and well trained voice.”

“I’m afraid you are incorrigible. You ought to have said that I sang better than I danced, and the fib would have pleased me immensely; we women like to hear ourselves praised for accomplishments we don’t possess. No, my dear, rule art out of the cast and substitute advertisement. Did you notice a dowdy creature who was lunching with two men on your right? She wore a brown Tussore silk and a turban—well, she writes the ‘Pars About People’ in ‘The Daily Journal.’ I’ll bet you a pair of gloves that you will see something like this in to-morrow’s paper: ‘Lord Archie Beaumanoir entertained a party of friends at the Embankment Hotel yesterday. At the next table Miss Millicent Jaques, of the Wellington Theater, was lunching with a pretty girl whom I did not know. Miss Jaques wore an exquisite,’ etc., etc. Fill in full details of my personal appearance, and you have the complete paragraph. The public, the stupid, addle-headed public, fatten on that sort of thing, and it keeps me going far more effectively than my feeble attempts to warble a couple of songs which you could sing far better if only you made up your mind to come on the stage. But there! After such unwonted candor I must have a smoke. You won’t try a cigarette? Well, don’t look so shocked. This isn’t a church, you know.”

Spencer, who had listened with interest to Miss Jaques’s outspoken views, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was playing the part of an eavesdropper. He had all an American’s chivalrous instincts where women were concerned, and his first impulse was to betake himself and his letters to his own room. Yet, when all was said and done, he was in a hotel; the girls were strangers, and likely to remain so; and it was their own affair if they chose to indulge in unguarded confidences. So he compromised with his scruples by pouring out a glass of water, replacing the decanter on its tray with some degree of noise. Then he struck an unnecessary match and applied it to his cigar before opening the first of the Denver letters.

As his glance was momentarily diverted, he did not grasp the essential fact that neither of the pair was disturbed by his well meant efforts. Millicent Jaques was lighting a cigarette, and this, to a woman, is an all absorbing achievement, while her friend was so new to her palatial surroundings that she had not the least notion of the existence of another open floor just above the level of her eyes.

“I don’t know how in the world you manage to exist,” went on the actress, tilting herself back in her chair to watch the smoke curling lazily upward. “What was it you said the other day when we met? You are some sort of secretary and amanuensis to a scientist? Does that mean typewriting? And what is the science?”

“Professor von Eulenberg is a well known man,” was the quiet reply. “I type his essays and reports, it is true; but I also assist in his classification work, and it is very interesting.”

“What does he classify?”

“Mostly beetles.”

“Oh, how horrid! Do you ever see any?”

“Thousands.”

“I should find one enough. If it is a fair question, what does your professor pay you?”

“Thirty shillings a week. In his own way he is as poor as I am.”

“And do you mean to tell me that you can live in those nice rooms you took me to, and dress decently on that sum?”

“I do, as a matter of fact; but I have a small pension, and I earn a little by writing titbits of scientific gossip for ‘The Firefly.’ Herr von Eulenberg helps. He translates interesting paragraphs from the foreign technical papers, and I jot them down, and by that means I pick up sufficient to buy an extra hat or wrap, and go to a theater or a concert. But I have to be careful, as my employer is absent each summer for two months. He goes abroad to hunt new specimens, and of course I am not paid then.”

“Is he away now?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you pass your time?”

“I write a good deal. Some day I hope to get a story accepted by one of the magazines; but it is so hard for a beginner to find an opening.”

“Yet when I offered to give you a start in the chorus of the best theater in London,—a thing, mind you, that thousands of girls are aching for,—you refused.”

“I’m sorry, Millie dear; but I am not cut out for the stage. It does not appeal to me.”

“Heigho! Tastes differ. Stick to your beetles, then, and marry your professor.”

Helen laughed, with a fresh joyousness that was good to hear. “Herr von Eulenberg is blessed with an exceedingly stout wife and five very healthy children already,” she cried.

“Then that settles it. You’re mad, quite mad! Let us talk of something else. Do you ever have a holiday? Where are you going this year? I’m off to Champèry when the theater closes.”

“Champèry,—in Switzerland, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, that is the dream of my life,—to see the everlasting snows; to climb those grand, solemn mountains; to cross the great passes that one reads of in the travel books. Now at last you have made me envious. Are you going alone? But of course that is a foolish question. You intend to join others from the theater, no doubt?”

“Well—er—something of the sort. I fear my enthusiasm will not carry me far on the lines that would appeal to you. I suppose you consider a short skirt, strong boots, a Tyrolese hat, and an alpenstock to be a sufficient rig-out, whereas my mountaineering costumes will fill five large trunks and three hat boxes. I’m afraid, Helen, we don’t run on the same rails, as our American cousins say.”

There was a little pause. Millicent’s words, apparently tossed lightly into the air after a smoke spiral, had in them a touch of bitterness, it might be of self analysis. Her guest seemed to take thought before she answered:

“Perhaps the divergence is mainly in environment. And I have always inclined to the more serious side of life. Even when we were together in Brussels——”

“You? Serious? At Madam Bérard’s? I like that. Who was it that kicked the plaster off the dormitory wall higher than her head? Who put pepper in Signor Antonio’s snuff box?”

Spencer saw the outer waves of a flush on Helen’s cheeks. “This is exceedingly interesting,” he thought; “but I cannot even persuade myself that I ought to listen any longer. Yet, if I rise now and walk away they will know I heard every word.”

Nevertheless, he meant to go, at the risk of their embarrassment; but he waited for Helen’s reply. She laughed, and the ripple of her mirth was as musical as her voice, whereas many women dowered with pleasantly modulated notes for ordinary conversation should be careful never to indulge in laughter, which is less controllable and therefore natural.

“That is the worst of having a past,” she said. “Let me put it, then, that entomology as a pursuit sternly represses frivolousness.”

“Does entomology mean beetles?”

“My dear, if you asked Herr von Eulenberg that question he would sate your curiosity with page extracts from one of his books. He has written a whole volume to prove that the only true entoma, or insects, are Condylopoda and Hexapoda, which means——”

“Cockroaches! Good gracious! To think of Helen Wynton, who once hit a Belgian boy very hard on the nose for being rude, wasting her life on such rubbish! And you actually seem to thrive on it. I do believe you are far happier than I.”

“At present I am envying you that trip to Champèry. Why cannot some fairy godmother call in at No. 5, Warburton Gardens, to-night and wave over my awed head a wand that shall scatter sleeping car tickets and banknotes galore, or at any rate sufficient thereof to take me to the Engadine and back?”

“Ah, the Engadine. I am not going there this year, I think.”

“Haven’t you planned your tour yet?”

“No—that is, not exactly.”

“Do you know, that is one of my greatest pleasures. With a last year’s Continental Bradshaw and a few tattered Baedekers I journey far afield. I know the times, the fares, and the stopping places of all the main routes from Calais and Boulogne. I could pass a creditable examination in most of the boat and train services by way of Ostend, Flushing, and the Hook of Holland. I assure you, Millie, when my ship does come home, or the glittering lady whom I have invoked deigns to visit my lodgings, I shall call a cab for Charing Cross or Victoria with the assurance of a seasoned traveler.”

For some reason, Miss Jaques refused to share her friend’s enthusiasm. “You are easily pleased,” she said listlessly. “For my part, after one shuddering glance at the Channel, I try to deaden all sensation till I find myself dressing for dinner at the Ritz. I positively refuse to go beyond Paris the first day. Ah, bother! Here comes a man whom I wish to avoid. Let us be on the move before he sees us, which he cannot fail to do. Don’t forget that I have a rehearsal at three. I haven’t, really; but we must escape somehow.”

Spencer, who had salved his conscience by endeavoring to read a technical letter on mining affairs, would be less than human if he did not lift his eyes then. It is odd how the sense of hearing, when left to its unfettered play by the absence of the disturbing influence of facial expression, can discriminate in its analysis of the subtler emotions. He was quite sure that Miss Jaques was startled, even annoyed, by the appearance of some person whom she did not expect to meet, and he surveyed the new arrival critically, perhaps with latent hostility.

He saw a corpulent, well dressed man standing at the foot of the stairs and looking around the spacious room. Obviously, he had not come from the restaurant. He carried his hat, gloves, and stick in his left hand. With his right hand he caressed his chin, and his glance wandered slowly over the little knots of people in the foyer. Beyond the fact that a large diamond sparkled on one of his plump fingers, and that his olive tinted face was curiously opposed to the whiteness of the uplifted hand, he differed in no essential from the hundreds of spick and span idlers who might be encountered at that hour in the west end of London. He had the physique and bearing of a man athletic in his youth but now over-indulgent. An astute tailor had managed to conceal the too rounded curves of the fourth decade by fashioning his garments skillfully. His coat fitted like a skin across his shoulders but hung loosely in front. The braid of a colored waistcoat was a marvel of suggestion in indicating a waist, and the same adept craftsmanship carried the eye in faultless lines to his verni boots. Judged by his profile, he was not ill looking. His features were regular, the mouth and chin strong, the forehead slightly rounded, and the nose gave the merest hint of Semitic origin. Taken altogether, he had the style of a polished man of the world, and Spencer smiled at the sudden fancy that seized him.

“I am attending the first act of a little play,” he thought. “Helen and Millicent rise and move to center of stage; enter the conventional villain.”

Miss Jaques was not mistaken when she said that her acquaintance would surely see her. She and Helen Wynton had not advanced a yard from their corner before the newcomer discovered them. He hastened to meet them, with the aspect of one equally surprised and delighted. His manners were courtly, and displayed great friendliness; but Spencer was quick to notice the air of interest with which his gaze rested on Helen. It was possible to see now that Millicent’s unexpected friend had large, prominent dark eyes which lent animation and vivacity to a face otherwise heavy and coarse. It was impossible to hear all that was said, as the trio stood in the middle of the room and a couple of men passing up the stairs at the moment were talking loudly. But Spencer gathered that Millicent was explaining volubly how she and Miss Wynton had “dropped in here for luncheon by the merest chance,” and was equally emphatic in the declaration that she was already overdue at the theater.

The man said something, and glanced again at Helen. Evidently, he asked for an introduction, which Miss Jaques gave with an affability that was eloquent of her powers as an actress. The unwished for cavalier was not to be shaken off. He walked with them up the stairs and crossed the entrance hall. Spencer, stuffing his letters into a pocket, strolled that way too, and saw this pirate in a morning coat bear off both girls in a capacious motor car.

Not to be balked of the dénouement of the little comedy in real life for which he had provided the audience, the American grabbed the hall porter.

“Say,” he said, “do you know that gentleman?”

“Yes, sir. That is Mr. Mark Bower.”

Spencer beamed on the man as though he had just discovered that Mr. Mark Bower was his dearest friend.

“Well, now, if that isn’t the queerest thing!” he said. “Is that Mark? He’s just gone round to the Wellington Theater, I guess. How far is it from here?”

“Not a hundred yards, sir.”

Off went Spencer, without his hat. He had intended to follow in a cab, but a sprint would be more effective over such a short distance. He crossed the Strand without heed to the traffic, turned to the right, and, to use his own phrase, “butted into a policeman” at the first corner.

“I’m on the hunt for the Wellington Theater,” he explained.

“You needn’t hunt much farther,” said the constable good humoredly. “There it is, a little way up on the left.”

At that instant Spencer saw Bower raise his hat to the two women. They hurried inside the theater, and their escort turned to reënter his motor. The American had learned what he wanted to know. Miss Jaques had shaken off her presumed admirer, and Miss Wynton had aided and abetted her in the deed.

“You don’t say!” he exclaimed, gazing at the building admiringly. “It looks new. In fact the whole street has a kind of San Francisco-after-the-fire appearance.”

“That’s right, sir. It’s not so long since some of the worst slums in London were pulled down to make way for it.”

“It’s fine; but I’m rather stuck on antiquities. I’ve seen plenty of last year’s palaces on the other side. Have a drink, will you, when time’s up?”

The policeman glanced surreptitiously at the half-crown which Spencer insinuated into his palm, and looked after the donor as he went back to the hotel.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” he said to himself. “I’ve often heard tell of the way some Americans see London; but I never came across a chap who rushed up in his bare head and took a squint at any place in that fashion. He seemed to have his wits about him too; but there must be a screw loose somewhere.”

And indeed Charles K. Spencer, had he paused to take stock of his behavior, must have admitted that it was, to say the least, erratic. But his imagination was fired; his sympathies were all a-quiver with the thought that it lay within his power to share with a kin soul some small part of the good fortune that had fallen to his lot of late.

“Wants a fairy godmother, does she?” he asked himself, and the quiet humor that gleamed in his face caused more than one passerby to turn and watch him as he strode along the pavement. “Well, I guess I’ll play a character not hitherto heard of in the legitimate drama. What price the fairy godfather? I’ve a picture of myself in that rôle. Oh, my! See me twirl that wand! Helen, you shall climb those rocks. But I don’t like your friend. I sha’n’t send you to Champèry. No—Champèry’s off the map for you.”

CHAPTER II

THE FULFILLMENT OF THE WISH

Explanations of motive are apt to become tedious. They are generally inaccurate too; for who can reduce a fantasy to a formula? Nor should they ever be allowed to clip the wings of romance. But the painter who bade his subject sit under a sodium light would justly be deemed a lunatic, and any analysis of Spencer’s character drawn from his latest prank would be faulty in the extreme.

In all London at that moment there was not a more level headed man of his years. He was twenty-eight, an expert mining engineer, and the successful pioneer of a new method of hauling ore. Even in Western America, “God’s own country,” as it is held to be by those who live there, few men “arrive” so early in life. Some, it is true, amass wealth by lucky speculation before they are fitted by experience to earn the price of a suit of clothes. But they are of the freak order. They are not to be classed with one who by hard work wrests a fortune out of the grim Colorado granite. Spencer had been called on to endure long years of rebuff and scorn. Though scoffed at by many who thought he was wrong, he persisted because he knew he was right.

Ofttimes Fate will test such a man almost to breaking point. Then she yields, and, being feminine, her obduracy is the measure of her favors, for she will bestow on her dogged suitor all, and more than all, that he desired.

The draft from Leadville, crammed so carelessly into a pocket when he followed the three to the door, was a fair instance of this trick of hers. A tunnel, projected and constructed in the teeth of ridicule and financial opposition, had linked up the underground workings of several mines, and proved conclusively that it was far cheaper to bring minerals to the rail in that manner than to sink expensive shafts, raise the ore to the top of a mountain, and cart it to its old level in the valley.

Once the thing was indisputable, the young engineer found himself rich and famous. To increase the feeders of the main bore, he drove another short gallery through a mining claim acquired for a few dollars,—a claim deemed worthless owing to a geological fault that traversed its whole length. That was Fate’s opportunity. Doubtless she smiled mischievously when she gave him a vein of rich quartz through which to quarry his way. The mere delving of the rock had produced two thousand dollars’ worth of ore, of which sum he took a moiety by agreement with the company that purchased his rights.

People in Leadville soon discovered that Spencer was a bright man,—“yes, sir, a citizen of whom the chief mining city of the Rocky Mountains has every reason to be proud,”—and the railway magnate who had nearly ruined him by years of hostility buried the past grandiloquently with a mot.

“Charles K. Spencer can’t be sidetracked,” he said. “That K isn’t in his name by accident. Look at it,—a regular buffer of a letter! Tell you what, you may monkey with Charles; but when you hit the K look out for trouble.”

Whereupon the miners laughed, and said that the president was a mighty smart man too, and Spencer, who knew he was a thief, but was unwilling to quarrel with him for the sake of the company, thought that a six months’ vacation in Europe would make for peace and general content.

He had no plans. He was free to wander whithersoever chance led him. Arriving in London from Plymouth late on a Thursday evening, he took a bus-driver’s holiday on Friday. Finding a tunnel under the Thames in full progress near the hotel, he sought the resident engineer, spoke to him in the lingua franca of the craft, and spent several dangerous and enjoyable hours in crawling through all manner of uncomfortable passages bored by human worms beneath the bed of the river.

And this was Saturday, and here he was, at three o’clock in the afternoon, turning over in his mind the best way of sending on an expensive trip abroad a girl who had not the remotest notion of his existence. It was a whim, and a harmless one, and he excused it to his practical mind by the reflection that he was entitled to one day of extravagance after seven years of hard labor. For his own part, he was weary of mountains. He had wrought against one, frowning and stubborn as any Alp, and had not desisted until he reached its very heart with a four thousand foot lance. Switzerland was the last place in Europe he would visit. He wanted to see old cities and dim cathedrals, to lounge in pleasant lands where rivers murmured past lush meadows. Though an American born and bred, there was a tradition in his home that the Spencers were once people of note on the border. When tired of London, he meant to go north, and ramble through Liddesdale in search of family records. But the business presently on hand was to arrange that Swiss excursion for “Helen,” and he set about it with characteristic energy.

In the first instance, he noted her name and address on the back of the Leadville envelop. Then he sought the manager.

“I guess you know Switzerland pretty well,” he said, when a polite man was produced by a boy.

The assumption was well founded. In fact, the first really important looking object the manager remembered seeing in this world was the giant Matterhorn, because his mother told him that if he was a bad boy he would be carried off by the demons that dwelt on its summit.

“What sort of places are Evian-les-Bains and Champèry?” went on Spencer.

“Evian is a fashionable lakeside town. Champèry is in the hills behind it. When Evian becomes too hot in August, one goes to Champèry to cool down.”

“Are they anywhere near the Engadine?”

“Good gracious, no! They are as different as chalk and cheese.”

“Is the Engadine the cheese? Does it take the biscuit?”

The manager laughed. Like all Londoners, he regarded every American as a humorist. “It all depends,” he said. “For my part, I think the Upper Engadine is far and away the most charming section of Switzerland; but there are ladies of my acquaintance who would unhesitatingly vote for Evian, and for a score of other places where there are promenades and casinos. Are you thinking of making a tour there?”

“There’s no telling where I may bring up when I cross the Channel,” said Spencer. “I have heard some talk of the two districts, and it occurred to me that you were just the man to give me a few useful pointers.”

“Well, the average tourist rushes from one valley to another, tramps over a pass each morning, and spends the afternoon in a train or on board a lake steamer. But if I wanted a real rest, and wished at the same time to be in a center from which pleasant walks, or stiff climbs for that matter, could be obtained, I should go by the Engadine Express to St. Moritz, and drive from there to the Maloja-Kulm, where there is an excellent hotel and usually a number of nice people.”

“English?”

“Yes, English and Americans. They select the best as a rule, you know.”

“It sounds attractive,” said Spencer.

“And it is, believe me. Don’t forget the name, Maloja-Kulm. It is twelve miles from everywhere, and practically consists of the one big hotel.”

Spencer procured his hat, gloves, and stick, and called a cab. “Take me to ‘The Firefly’ office,” he said.

“Beg pawdon, sir, but where’s that?” asked the driver.

“It’s up to you to find out.”

“Then w’at is it, guv’nor? I’ve heerd of the ’Orse an’ ’Ound, the Chicken’s Friend, the Cat, an’ the Bee; but the Firefly leaves me thinkin’. Is it a noospaper?”

“Something of the sort.”

“All right, sir. Jump in. We’ll soon be on its track.”

The hansom scampered off to Fleet-st. As the result of inquiries Spencer was deposited at the entrance to a dingy court, the depths of which, he was assured, were illumined by “The Firefly.” There is nothing that so mystifies the citizen of the New World as the hole-and-corner aspect of some of the business establishments of London. He soon learns, however, to differentiate between the spidery dens where money is amassed and the soot laden tenements in which the struggle for existence is keen. A comprehensive glance at the exterior of the premises occupied by “The Firefly” at once explained to Spencer why the cabman did not know its whereabouts. Three small rooms sufficed for its literary and commercial staff, and “To let” notices stared from several windows in the same building.

“Appearances are deceptive ever,” murmured he, as he scanned the legends on three doors in a narrow lobby; “but I think I’m beginning to catch on to the limited extent of Miss Helen’s earnings from her scientific paragraphs.”

He knocked at each door; but received no answer. Then, having sharp ears, he tried the handle of one marked “Private.” It yielded, and he entered, to be accosted angrily by a pallid, elderly, bewhiskered man, standing in front of a much littered table.

“Confound it, sir!” came the growl, “don’t you know it is Saturday afternoon? And what do you mean by coming in unannounced?”

“Guess you’re the editor?” said Spencer.

“What if I am?”

“I’ve just happened along to have a few quiet words with you. If there’s no callers Saturdays, why, that’s exactly what I want, and I came right in because you didn’t answer my knock.”

“I tell you I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Then you shouldn’t draw corks while anybody is damaging the paint outside.”

Spencer smiled so agreeably that the editor of “The Firefly” softened. At first, he had taken his visitor for an unpaid contributor; but the American accent banished this phantom of the imagination. He continued to pour into a tumbler the contents of a bottle of beer.

“Well,” he said, “now that you are here, what can I do for you, Mr.——”

“Spencer—Charles K. Spencer.”

Instantly it struck the younger man that little more than an hour had elapsed since he gave his name to the letter clerk in the hotel. The singularity of his proceedings during that hour was thereby brought home to him. He knew nothing of newspapers, daily or weekly; but commonsense suggested that “The Firefly’s” radiance was not over-powering. His native shrewdness advised caution, though he felt sure that he could, in homely phrase, twist this faded journalist round his little finger.

“Before I open the ball,” he said, “may I see a copy of your magazine?”

Meanwhile the other was trying to sum him up. He came to the conclusion that his visitor meant to introduce some new advertising scheme, and, as “The Firefly” was sorely in need of advertisements, he decided to listen.

“Here is last week’s issue,” he said, handing to Spencer a small sixteen-page publication. The American glanced through it rapidly, while the editor sampled the beer.

“I see,” said Spencer, after he had found a column signed “H. W.,” which consisted of paragraphs translated from a German article on airships,—“I see that ‘The Firefly’ scintillates around the Tree of Knowledge.”

The editor relaxed sufficiently to smile. “That is a good description of its weekly flights,” he said.

“You don’t use many cuts?”

“N-no. They are expensive and hard to obtain for such subjects as we favor.”

“Don’t you think it would be a good notion to brighten it up a bit—put in something lively, and more in keeping with the name?”

“I have no opening for new matter, if that is what you mean,” and the editor stiffened again.

“But you have the say-so as to the contents, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. The selection rests with me.”

“Good. I’m sort of interested in a young lady, Miss Helen Wynton by name. She lives in Warburton Gardens, and does work for you occasionally. Now, I propose to send her on a month’s trip to Switzerland, where she will represent ‘The Firefly.’ You must get her to turn out a couple of pages of readable stuff each week, which you will have illustrated by a smart artist at a cost of say, twenty pounds an article for drawings and blocks. I pay all expenses, she gets the trip, and you secure some good copy for nothing. Is it a deal?”

The editor sat down suddenly and combed his whiskers with nervous fingers. He was a weak man, and a too liberal beer diet was not good for him.

“Are you in earnest, Mr. Spencer?” he queried in a bewildered way.

“Dead in earnest. You write the necessary letter to Miss Wynton while I am here, and I hand you the first twenty in notes. You are to tell her to call Monday noon at any bank you may select, and she will be given her tickets and a hundred pounds. When I am certain that she has started I undertake to pay you a further sum of sixty pounds. I make only two conditions. You must guarantee to star her work, as it should help her some, and my identity must not be disclosed to her under any circumstances. In a word, she must regard herself as the accredited correspondent of ‘The Firefly.’ If she appears to be a trifle rattled by your generosity in the matter of terms, you must try and look as if you did that sort of thing occasionally and would like to do it often.”

The editor pushed his chair away from the table. He seemed to require more air. “Again I must ask you if you actually mean what you say?” he gasped.

Spencer opened a pocketbook and counted four five-pound notes out of a goodly bundle. “It is all here in neat copperplate,” he said, placing the notes on the table. “Maybe you haven’t caught on to the root idea of the proposition,” he continued, seeing that the other man was staring at him blankly. “I want Miss Wynton to have a real good time. I also want to lift her up a few rungs of the journalistic ladder. But she is sensitive, and would resent patronage; so I must not figure in the affair at all. I have no other motive at the back of my head. I’m putting up two hundred pounds out of sheer philanthropy. Will you help?”

“There are points about this amazing proposal that require elucidation,” said the editor slowly. “Travel articles might possibly come within the scope of ‘The Firefly’; but I am aware that Miss Wynton is what might be termed an exceedingly attractive young lady. For instance, you wouldn’t be philanthropic on my account.”

“You never can tell. It all depends how your case appealed to me. But if you are hinting that I intend to use my scheme for the purpose of winning Miss Wynton’s favorable regard, I must say that she strikes me as the kind of girl who would think she had been swindled if she learned the truth. In any event, I may never see her again, and it is certainly not my design to follow her to Switzerland. I don’t kick at your questions. You’re old enough to be her father, and mine, for that matter. Go ahead. This is Saturday afternoon, you know, and there’s no business stirring.”

Spencer had to cover the ground a second time before everything was made clear. At last the fateful letter was written. He promised to call on Monday and learn how the project fared. Then he relieved the cabman’s anxiety, as the alley possessed a second exit, and was driven to the Wellington Theater, where he secured a stall for that night’s performance of the Chinese musical comedy in which Miss Millicent Jaques played the part of a British Admiral’s daughter.

While Spencer was watching Helen’s hostess cutting capers in a Mandarin’s palace, Helen herself was reading, over and over again, a most wonderful letter that had fallen from her sky. It had all the appearance of any ordinary missive. The King’s face on a penny stamp, or so much of it as was left uninjured by a postal smudge, looked familiar enough, and both envelop and paper resembled those which had brought her other communications from “The Firefly.” But the text was magic, rank necromancy. No wizard who ever dealt in black letter treatises could have devised a more convincing proof of his occult powers than this straightforward offer made by the editor of “The Firefly.” Four articles of five thousand words each,—tickets and 100 pounds awaiting her at a bank,—go to the Maloja-Kulm Hotel; leave London at the earliest possible date; please send photographs and suggestions for black-and-white illustrations of mountaineering and society! What could it possibly mean?

At the third reading Helen began to convince herself that this rare stroke of luck was really hers. The concluding paragraph shed light on “The Firefly’s” extraordinary outburst.

“As this commission heralds a new departure for the paper, I have to ask you to be good enough not to make known the object of your journey. In fact, it will be as well if you do not state your whereabouts to any persons other than your near relatives. Of course, all need for secrecy ceases with the appearance of your first article; but by that time you will practically be on your way home again. I am anxious to impress on you the importance of this instruction.”

Helen found herein the germ of understanding. “The Firefly” meant to boom itself on its Swiss correspondence; but even that darksome piece of journalistic enterprise did not explain the princely munificence of the hundred pounds. At last, when she calmed down sufficiently to be capable of connected thought, she saw that “mountaineering” implied the hire of guides, and that “society” meant frocks. Of course it was intended that she should spend the whole of the money, and thus give “The Firefly” a fair return for its outlay. And a rapid calculation revealed the dazzling fact that after setting aside the fabulous sum of two pounds a day for expenses she still had forty pounds left wherewith to replenish her scanty stock of dresses.

Believing that at any instant the letter might dissolve into a curt request to keep her scientific jottings strictly within the limits of a column, Helen sat with it lying open on her lap, and searched the pages of a tattered guidebook for particulars of the Upper Engadine. She had read every line before; but the words now seemed to live. St. Moritz, Pontresina, Sils-Maria, Silvaplana,—they ceased to be mere names,—they became actualities. The Julier Pass, the Septimer, the Forno Glacier, the Diavolezza Route, and the rest of the stately panorama of snow capped peaks, blue lakes, and narrow valleys,—valleys which began with picturesque chalets, dun colored cattle, and herb laden pastures, and ended in the yawning mouths of ice rivers whence issued the milky white streams that dashed through the lower gorges,—they passed before her eyes as she read till she was dazzled by their glories.

What a day dream to one who dwelt in smoky London year in and year out! What an experience to look forward to! What memories to treasure! Nor was she blind to the effect of the undertaking on her future. Though “The Firefly” was not an important paper, though its editor was of a half-forgotten day and generation, she would now have good work to show when asked what she had done. She was not enamored of beetles. Even the classifying of them was monotonous, and she had striven bravely to push her way through the throng of would-be writers that besieged the doors of every popular periodical in London. It was a heartbreaking struggle. The same post that gave her this epoch marking letter had brought back two stories with the stereotyped expression of editorial regret.

“Now,” thought Helen, when her glance fell on the bulky envelops, “my name will at least become known. And editors very much resemble the public they cater for. If a writer achieves success, they all want him. I have often marveled how any author got his first chance. Now I know. It comes this way, like a flash of lightning from a summer sky.”

It was only fit and proper that she should magnify her first real commission. No veteran soldier ever donned a field marshal’s uniform with the same zest that he displayed when his subaltern’s outfit came from the tailor. So Helen glowed with that serious enthusiasm which is the soul of genius, for without it life becomes flat and gray, and she passed many anxious, half-doubting hours until a courteous bank official handed her a packet at the appointed time on Monday, and gave her a receipt to sign, and asked her how she would take her hundred pounds—did she want it all in notes or some in gold?

She was so unnerved by this sudden confirmation of her good fortune that she stammered confusedly, “I—really—don’t know.”

“Well, it would be rather heavy in gold,” came the smiling comment. “This money, I understand, is paid to you for some journalistic enterprise that will take you abroad. May I suggest that you should carry, say, thirty pounds in notes and ten in gold, and allow me to give you the balance in the form of circular notes, which are payable only under your signature?”

“Yes,” said Helen, rosy red at her own awkwardness, “that will be very nice.”

The official pushed across the counter some banknotes and sovereigns, and summoned a commissionaire to usher her into the waiting room till he had prepared the circular notes. The respite was a blessing. It gave Helen time to recover her self possession. She opened the packet and found therein coupons for the journey to and from St. Moritz, together with a letter from the sleeping car company, from which she gathered that a berth on the Engadine Express was provisionally reserved in her name for the following Thursday, but any change to a later date must be made forthwith, as the holiday pressure was beginning. It was advisable too, she was reminded, that she should secure her return berth before leaving London.

Each moment the reality of the tour became more patent. She might feel herself bewitched; but pounds sterling and railway tickets were tangible things, and not to be explained away by any fantasy. By the time her additional wealth was ready she was better fitted to guard it. She hurried away quite unconscious of the admiring eyes that were raised from dockets and ledgers behind the grille. She made for the court in which “The Firefly” had its abode. The squalor of the passage, the poverty stricken aspect of the stairs,—items which had prepared her on other occasions for the starvation rate of pay offered for her work,—now passed unheeded. This affectation of scanty means was humorous. Obviously, some millionaire had secured what the newspapers called “a controlling interest” in “The Firefly.”

She sought Mackenzie, the editor, and he received her with a manifest reluctance to waste his precious time over details that was almost as convincing as the money and vouchers she carried.

“Yes, Thursday will suit admirably,” he said in reply to her breathless questions. “You will reach Maloja on Friday evening, and if you post the first article that day week it will arrive in good time for the next number. As for the style and tone, I leave those considerations entirely to you. So long as the matter is bright and readable, that is all I want. I put my requirements clearly in my letter. Follow that, and you cannot make any mistake.”

Helen little realized how precise were the instructions given two hours earlier to the editor, the bank clerk, and the sleeping car company. Mackenzie’s curt acceptance of her mission brought a wondering cry to her lips.

“I am naturally overjoyed at my selection for this work,” she said. “May I ask how you came to think of me?”

“Oh, it is hard to say how these things are determined,” he answered. “We liked your crisp way of putting dull facts, I suppose, and thought that a young lady’s impressions of life in an Anglo-Swiss summer community would be fresher and more attractive than a man’s. That is all. I hope you will enjoy your experiences.”

“But, please, I want to thank you——”

“Not a word! Business is business, you know. If a thing is worth doing, it must be done well. Good-by!”

He flattered himself that he could spend another man’s money with as lordly an air as the youngest journalist on Fleet-st. The difficulty was to find the man with the money, and Mackenzie had given much thought during the Sabbath to the potentialities that lay behind Spencer’s whim. He was sure the incident would not close with the publication of Miss Wynton’s articles. Judiciously handled, her unknown benefactor might prove equally beneficial to “The Firefly.”

So Helen tripped out into Fleet-st., and turned her pretty face westward, and looked so eager and happy that it is not surprising if many a man eyed her as she passed, and many a woman sighed to think that another woman could find life in this dreary city such a joyous thing.

A sharp walk through the Strand and across Trafalgar Square did a good deal toward restoring the poise of her wits. For safety, she had pinned the envelop containing her paper money and tickets inside her blouse. The mere presence of the solid little parcel reminded her at every movement that she was truly bound for the wonderful Engadine, and, now that the notion was becoming familiar, she was the more astonished that the choice of “The Firefly” had fallen on her. It was all very well for Mr. Mackenzie to say that the paper would be brightened by a woman’s views on life in the high Alps. The poor worn man looked as if such a holiday would have done him a world of good. But the certain fact remained that there was no room for error. It was she, Helen Wynton, and none other, for whom the gods had contrived this miracle. If it had been possible, she would have crossed busy Cockspur-st. with a hop, skip, and a jump in order to gain the sleeping car company’s premises.

She knew the place well. Many a time had she looked at the attractive posters in the windows,—those gorgeous fly sheets that told of winter in summer among the mountains of Switzerland and the Tyrol, and of summer in winter along the sunlit shores of the Côte d’Azur. She almost laughed aloud at the thought that possessed her as she waited for a moment on the curb to allow a press of traffic to pass.

“If my luck holds till Christmas, I may be sent to Monte Carlo,” she said to herself. “And why not? It’s the first step that counts, and ‘The Firefly,’ once fairly embarked on a career of wild extravagance, may keep it up.”

Under the pressure of that further inspiration she refused to wait any longer, but dodged an omnibus, a motor car, and some hansoms, and pushed open the swing doors of the Bureau de la Campagnie des Wagons-Lits. She did not notice that the automobile stopped very quickly a few yards higher up the street. The occupant, Mark Bower, alighted, looked at her through the window to make sure he was not mistaken, and followed her into the building. He addressed some question to an attendant, and heard Helen say:

“Yes, please. Thursday will suit admirably. I am going straight through to St. Moritz. I shall call on Wednesday and let you know what day I wish to return.”

If Bower had intended to speak to her, he seemed to change his mind rather promptly. Helen’s back was turned. She was watching a clerk writing out a voucher for her berth in the sleeping car, and the office was full of other prospective travelers discussing times and routes with the officials. Bower thanked his informant for information which he could have supplied in ampler detail himself. Then he went out, and looked again at Helen from the doorway; but she was wholly unaware of his presence.

Thus it came about, quite simply and naturally, that Mark Bower met Miss Helen Wynton on the platform of Victoria Station on Thursday morning, and learned that, like himself, she was a passenger by the Engadine Express. He took her presence as a matter of course, hoped she would allow him to secure her a comfortable chair on the steamer, told her that the weather report was excellent, and remarked that they might expect a pleasant crossing in the new turbine steamer.

“I am going through to St. Moritz.”
Page [38]

Then, having ascertained that she had a corner seat, and that her luggage was registered through to St. Moritz (Helen having arrived at the station a good hour before the train was due to start), he bowed himself away, being far too skilled a stalker of such shy game to thrust his company on her at that stage.

His attitude was very polite and friendly, and Helen was almost grateful to the chance which had brought him there. She was feeling just a trifle lonely in the midst of the gay and chattering throng that crowded the station. The presence of one who was not wholly a stranger, of a friend’s friend, of a man whose name was familiar, made the journey look less dreamlike. She was glad he had not sought to travel in her carriage. That was tactful, and indeed his courtesy and pleasant words during her first brief meeting with him in the Embankment Hotel had conveyed the same favorable impression.

So when the hour hand of the big clock overhanging the center of the platform pointed to eleven, the long train glided quietly away with its load of pleasure-seekers, and neither Helen nor her new acquaintance could possibly know that their meeting had been witnessed, with a blank amazement that was rapidly transmuted into sheer annoyance, by a young American engineer named Charles K. Spencer.

CHAPTER III

WHEREIN TWO PEOPLE BECOME BETTER ACQUAINTED

Mackenzie, of course, was aware that Miss Wynton would leave London by the eleven o’clock train on Thursday, and Spencer saw no harm in witnessing her departure. He found a good deal of quiet fun in noting her animated expression and businesslike air. Her whole-souled enjoyment of novel surroundings was an asset for the outlay of his two hundred pounds, and he had fully and finally excused that piece of extravagance until he caught sight of Bower strolling along the platform with the easy confidence of one who knew exactly whom he would meet and how he would account for his unbidden presence.

Spencer at once suspected the man’s motives, not without fair cause. They were, he thought, as plain to him as they were hidden from the girl. Bower counterfeited the genuine surprise on Helen’s face with admirable skill; but, to the startled onlooker, peering beneath the actor’s mask, his stagy artifice was laid bare.

And Spencer was quite helpless, a condition that irritated him almost beyond control. He had absolutely no grounds for interference. He could only glower angrily and in silence at a meeting he could not prevent. Conjecture might run riot as to the causes which had given this sinister bend to an idyl, but perforce he must remain dumb.

From one point of view, it was lucky that Helen’s self appointed “godfather” was in a position not to misjudge her; from another, it would have been better for Spencer’s peace of mind were he left in ignorance of the trap that was apparently being laid for her. Perhaps Fate had planned this thing—having lately smiled on the American, she may have determined to plague him somewhat. At any rate, in that instant the whole trend of his purpose took a new turn. From a general belief that he would never again set eyes on one in whose fortunes he felt a transient interest, his intent swerved to a fixed resolve to protect her from Bower. It would have puzzled him to assign a motive for his dislike of the man. But the feeling was there, strong and active. It even gave him a certain satisfaction to remember that he was hostile to Bower before he had seen him.

Indeed, he nearly yielded to the momentary impulse that bade him hasten to the booking office and secure a ticket for St. Moritz forthwith. He dismissed the notion as quixotic and unnecessary. Bower’s attitude in not pressing his company on Miss Wynton at this initial stage of the journey revealed a subtlety that demanded equal restraint on Spencer’s part. Helen herself was so far from suspecting the truth that Bower would be compelled to keep up the pretense of a casual rencontre. Nevertheless, Spencer’s chivalric nature was stirred to the depths. The conversation overheard in the Embankment Hotel had given him a knowledge of the characteristics of two women that would have amazed both of them were they told of it. He was able to measure too the exact extent of Bower’s acquaintance with Helen, while he was confident that the relationship between Bower and Millicent Jaques had gone a great deal further than might be inferred from the actress’s curt statement that he was one whom she “wished to avoid.” These two extremes could be reconciled only by a most unfavorable estimate of Bower, and that the American conceded without argument.

Of course, there remained the possibility that Bower was really a traveler that day by idle chance; but Spencer blew aside this alternative with the first whiff of smoke from the cigar he lit mechanically as soon as the train left the station.

“No,” he said, in grim self communing, “the skunk found out somehow that she was going abroad, and planned to accompany her. I could see it in the smirk on his face as soon as he discovered her whereabouts on the platform. If he means to summer at Maloja, I guess my thousand dollars was expended to no good purpose, and the quicker I put up another thousand to pull things straight the happier I shall be. And let me tell you, mother, that if I get Helen through this business well and happy, I shall quit fooling round as godfather, or stage uncle, or any other sort of soft-hearted idiot. Meanwhile, Bower has jumped my claim.”

His glance happened to fall on an official with the legend “Ticket Inspector” on the collar of his coat. He remembered that this man, or some other closely resembling him, had visited the carriage in which Bower traveled.

“Say,” he cried, hailing him on the spur of the moment, “when does the next train leave for St. Moritz?”

“At two-twenty from Charing Cross, sir. But the Engadine Express is the best one. Did you miss it?”

“No. I just blew in here to see a friend off, and the trip kind of appealed to me. Did you notice a reserved compartment for a Mr. Mark Bower?”

“I know Mr. Bower very well, sir. He goes to Paris or Vienna twenty times a year.”

“To-day he is going to Switzerland.”

“So he is, to Zurich, I think. First single he had. But he’s sure to bring up in Vienna or Frankfort. I wish I knew half what he knows about foreign money business. I shouldn’t be punching tickets here very long. Thank you, sir. Charing Cross at two-twenty; but you may have difficulty about booking a berth in the sleeper. Just now everybody is crossing the Channel.”

“It looks like that,” said Spencer, who had obtained the information he wanted. Taking a cab, he drove to the sleeping car company’s office, where he asked for a map of the Swiss railways. Zurich, as Bower’s destination, puzzled him; but he did not falter in his purpose.

“The man is a rogue,” he thought, “or I have never seen one. Anyhow, a night in the train doesn’t cut any ice, and Switzerland can fill the bill for a week as well as London or Scotland.”

He was fortunate in the fact that some person wished to postpone a journey that day, and the accident assured him of comfortable quarters from Calais onward. Then he drove to a bank, and to “The Firefly” office. Mackenzie had just opened his second bottle of beer. By this time he regarded Spencer as an amiable lunatic. He greeted him now with as much glee as his dreary nature was capable of.

“Hello!” he said. “Been to see the last of the lady?”

“Not quite. I want to take back what I said about not going to Switzerland. I’m following this afternoon.”

“Great Scott! You’re sudden.”

“I’m built that way,” said Spencer dryly. “Here are the sixty pounds I promised you. Now I want you to do me a favor. Send a messenger to the Wellington Theater with a note for Miss Millicent Jaques, and ask her if she can oblige you with the present address of Miss Helen Wynton. Make a pretext of work. No matter if she writes to her friend and the inquiry leads to talk. You can put up a suitable fairy tale, I have no doubt.”

“Better still, let my assistant write. Then if necessary I can curse him for not minding his own business. But what’s in the wind?”

“I wish to find out whether or not Miss Jaques knows of this Swiss journey; that is all. If the reply reaches you by one o’clock send it to the Embankment Hotel. Otherwise, post it to me at the Kursaal, Maloja-Kulm; but not in an office envelop.”

“You’ll come back, Mr. Spencer?” said the editor plaintively, for he had visions of persuading the eccentric American to start a magazine of his own.

“Oh, yes. You’ll probably see me again within six days. I’ll look in and report progress. Good by.”

A messenger caught him as he was leaving the hotel. Mackenzie had not lost any time, and Miss Jaques happened to be at the theater.

“Sorry,” she wrote, in the artistic script that looks so well in face cream and soap advertisements, “I can’t for the life of me remember the number; but Miss Wynton lives somewhere in Warburton Gardens.” The signature, “Millicent Jaques,” was an elegant thing in itself, carefully thought out and never hurried in execution, no matter how pressed she might be for time. Spencer was on the point of scattering the note in little pieces along the Strand; but he checked himself.

“Guess I’ll keep this as a souvenir,” he said, and it found a place in his pocketbook.

Helen Wynton, having crossed the Channel many times during her childhood, was no novice amid the bustle and crush on the narrow pier at Dover. She had dispensed with all accessories for the journey, except the few articles that could be crammed into a handbag. Thus, being independent of porters, she was one of the first to reach the steamer’s gangway. As usual, all the most sheltered nooks on board were occupied. There seems to be a mysterious type of traveler who inhabits the cross-Channel vessels permanently. No matter how speedy may be the movements of a passenger by the boat-train, either at Dover or Calais, the best seats on the upper deck invariably reveal the presence of earlier arrivals by deposits of wraps and packages. This phenomenon was not strange to Helen. A more baffling circumstance was the altered shape of the ship. The familiar lines of the paddle steamer were gone, and Helen was wondering where she might best bestow herself and her tiny valise, when she heard Bower’s voice.

“I took the precaution to telegraph from London to one of the ship’s officers,” he said, and nodded toward a couple of waterproof rugs which guarded a recess behind the Captain’s cabin. “That is our corner, I expect. My friend will be here in a moment.”

Sure enough, a man in uniform approached and lifted his gold laced cap. “We have a rather crowded ship, Mr. Bower,” he said; “but you will be quite comfortable there. I suppose you deemed the weather too fine to need your usual cabin?”

“Yes. I have a companion to-day, you see.”

Helen was a little bewildered by this; but it was very pleasant to claim undisputed possession of a quiet retreat from which to watch others trying to find chairs. And, although Bower had a place reserved by her side, he did not sit down. He chatted for a few minutes on such eminently safe topics as the smooth sea, the superiority of turbine engines in the matter of steadiness, the advisability of lunching in the train after leaving Calais, rather than on board the ship, and soon betook himself aft, there to smoke and chat with some acquaintances whom he fell in with. Dover Castle was becoming a gray blur on the horizon when he spoke to Helen again.

“You look quite comfortable,” he said pleasantly, “and it is wise not to risk walking about if you are afraid of being ill.”

“I used to cross in bad weather without consequences,” she answered; “but I am older now, and am doubtful of experiments.”

“You were educated abroad, then?”

“Yes. I was three years in Brussels—three happy years.”

“Ah! Why qualify them? All your years are happy, I should imagine, if I may judge by appearances.”

“Well, if happiness can be defined as contentment, you are right; but I have had my sad periods too, Mr. Bower. I lost my mother when I was eighteen, and that was a blow under which I have never ceased to wince. Fortunately, I had to seek consolation in work. Added to good health, it makes for content.”

“You are quite a philosopher. Will you pardon my curiosity? I too lead the strenuous life. Now, I should like to have your definition of work. I am not questioning your capacity. My wonder is that you should mention it at all.”

“But why? Any man who knows what toil is should not regard women as dolls.”

“I prefer to look on them as goddesses.”

Helen smiled. “I fear, then, you will deem my pedestal a sorry one,” she said. “Perhaps you think, because you met me once in Miss Jaques’s company, and again here, traveling de luxe, that I am in her set. I am not. By courtesy I am called a ‘secretary’; but the title might be shortened into ‘typist.’ I help Professor von Eulenberg with his—scientific researches.”

Though it was on the tip of her tongue to say “beetles,” she substituted the more dignified phrase. Bower was very nice and kind; but she felt that “beetles” might sound somewhat flippant and lend a too familiar tone to their conversation.

“Von Eulenberg? I have heard of him. Quite a distinguished man in his own line; an authority on—moths, is it?”

“Insects generally.”

She blushed and laughed outright, not only at the boomerang effect of her grandiloquent description of the professor’s industry, but at the absurdity of her position. Above all else, Helen was candid, and there was no reason why she should not enlighten a comparative stranger who seemed to take a friendly interest in her.

“I ought to explain,” she went on, “that I am going to the Engadine as a journalist. I have had the good fortune to be chosen for a very pleasant task. Hence this present grandeur, which, I assure you, is not a usual condition of entomological secretaries.”

Bower pretended to ward off some unexpected attack. “I have done nothing to deserve a hard word like that, Miss Wynton,” he cried. “I shall not recover till we reach Calais. May I sit beside you while you tell me what it means?”

She made room for him. “Strictly speaking, it is nonsense,” she said.

“Excellent. That is the better line for women who are young and pretty. We jaded men of the world hate to be serious when we leave business behind. Now, you would scarce credit what a lively youngster I am when I come abroad for a holiday. I always kiss my fingers to France at the first sight of her fair face. She bubbles like her own champagne, whereas London invariably reminds me of beer.”

“Do I take it that you prefer gas to froth?”

“You offer me difficult alternatives, yet I accept them. Though gas is as dreadful a description of champagne as entomological is of a certain type of secretary, I would venture to point out that it expands, effervesces, soars ever to greater heights; but beer, froth and all, tends to become flat, stale, and unprofitable.”

“I assure you my knowledge of both is limited. I had never even tasted champagne until the other day.”

“When you lunched with Millicent at the Embankment Hotel?”

“Well—yes. She was at school with me, and we met last week by accident. She is making quite a success at the Wellington Theater, is she not?”

“So I hear. I am a director of that concern; but I seldom go there.”

“How odd that sounds to one who saves up her pennies to attend a favorite play!”

“Then you must have my address, and when I am in town you need never want a stall at any theater in London. Now, that is no idle promise. I mean it. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to think you were enjoying something through my instrumentality.”

“How exceedingly kind of you! I shall take you at your word. What girl wouldn’t?”

“I know quite a number who regard me as an ogre. I am not a lady’s man in the general sense of the term, Miss Wynton. I might tell you more about myself if it were not for signs that the next five minutes will bring us to Calais. You are far too independent, I suppose, that I should offer to carry your bag; but will you allow me to reserve a joint table for déjeuner? There will be a rush for the first service, which is the best, as a rule, and I have friends at court on this line. Please don’t say you are not hungry.”

“That would be impolite, and horribly untrue,” laughed Helen.

He took the implied permission, and hurried away. They did not meet again until he came to her carriage in the train.

“Is this where you are?” he cried, looking up at her through the open window. “I am in the next block, as they say in America. When you are ready I shall take you to the dining car. Come out on the platform. The corridors are simply impassable. And here are baskets of peaches, and ripe pears, and all manner of pleasant fruits. Yes, try the corridor to the right, and charge resolutely. If you inflict the maximum injury on others, you seldom damage yourself.”

In a word, Mark Bower spoke as lightheartedly as he professed to feel, and Helen had no cause whatever to be other than thankful for the chance that brought him to Switzerland on the same day and in the same train as herself. His delicate consideration for her well being was manifested in many ways. That such a man, whom she knew to be a figure of importance in the financial world, should take an interest in the simple chronicles of her past life was a flattering thing in itself. He listened sympathetically to the story of her struggles since the death of her mother. The consequent stoppage of the annuity paid to the widow of an Indian civilian rendered it necessary that Helen should supplement by her own efforts the fifty pounds a year allotted to her “until death or marriage.”

“There are plenty of country districts where I could exist quite easily on such a sum,” she said; “but I declined to be buried alive in that fashion, and I made up my mind to earn my own living. Somehow, London appeals to young people situated as I was. It is there that the great prizes are to be gained; so I came to London.”

“From——” broke in Bower, who was peeling one of the peaches bought at Calais.

“From a village near Sheringham, in Norfolk.”

He nodded with smiling comprehension when she detailed her struggles with editors who could detect no originality in her literary work.

“But that phase has passed now,” he said encouragingly.

“Well, it looks like it. I hope so; for I am tired of classifying beetles.”

There—the word was out at last. Perhaps Bower wondered why she laughed and blushed at the recollection of her earlier determination to suppress von Eulenberg’s “specimens” as a topic of conversation. Already the stiffness of their talk on board the steamship seemed to have vanished completely. It was really a pleasant way of passing the time to sit and chat in this glass palace while the train skimmed over a dull land of marshes and poplars.

“Beetles, though apt to be flighty, are otherwise dull creatures,” he said. “May I ask what paper you are representing on your present tour?”

It was an obvious and harmless question; but Helen was loyal to her bond. “It sounds absurd to have to say it, but I am pledged to secrecy,” she answered.

“Good gracious! Don’t tell me you intend to interview anarchists, or runaway queens, or the other disgruntled people who live in Switzerland. Moreover, they usually find quarters in Geneva, while you presumably are bound for the Engadine.”

“Oh, no. My work lies in less excitable circles. ‘Life in a Swiss hotel’ would be nearer the mark.”

“Apart from the unusual surroundings, you will find it suspiciously like life in a quiet Norfolk village, Miss Wynton,” said Bower. He paused, tasted the peach, and made a grimace. “Sour!” he protested. “Really, when all is said and done, the only place in which one can buy a decent peach is London.”

“Ah, a distinct score for Britain!”

“And a fair hit to your credit. Let me urge in self defense that if life in France bubbles, it occasionally leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Now you shall go and read, and sleep a little perhaps, if that is not a heretical thing to suggest. We have the same table for afternoon tea and dinner.”

Helen had never met such a versatile man. He talked of most things with knowledge and restraint and some humor. She could not help admitting that the journey would have been exceedingly dull without his companionship, and he had the tact to make her feel that he was equally indebted to her for passing the long hours. At dinner she noticed that they were served with dishes not supplied to others in the dining car.

“I hope you have not been ordering a dreadfully expensive meal,” she ventured to say. “I must pay my share, you know, and I am quite an economical person.”

“There!” he vowed. “That is the first unkind word you have uttered. Surely you will not refuse to be my guest? Indeed, I was hoping that to-day marked the beginning of a new era, wherein we might meet at times and criticize humanity to our hearts’ content.”

“I should feel unhappy if I did not pay,” she insisted.

“Well, then, I shall charge you table d’hôte prices. Will that content you?”

So, when the attendant came to the other tables, Helen produced her purse, and Bower solemnly accepted her few francs; but no bill was presented to him.

“You see,” he said, smiling at her through a glass of golden wine, “you have missed a great opportunity. Not one woman in a million can say that she has dined at the railway company’s expense in France.”

She was puzzled. His manner had become slightly more confidential during the meal. It needed no feminine intuition to realize that he admired her. Excitement, the sea air, the heated atmosphere, and unceasing onrush of the train, had flushed her cheeks and lent a deeper shade to her brown eyes. She knew that Bower’s was not the only glance that dwelt on her with a curious and somewhat unnerving appraisement. Other men, and not a few women, stared at her. The mirror in her dressing room had told her that she was looking her best, and her heart fluttered a little at the thought that she had succeeded, without effort, in winning the appreciation of a man highly placed in the world of fashion and finance. The conceit induced an odd feeling of embarrassment. To dispel it she took up his words in a vein of playful sarcasm.

“If you assure me that for some unexplained reason the railway authorities are giving us this excellent dinner for nothing, please return my money,” she said.

“The gifts of the gods, and eke of railway companies, must be taken without question,” he answered. “No, I shall keep your pieces of silver. I mean to invest them. It will amuse me to learn how much I can make on an initial capital of twelve francs, fifty centimes. Will you allow that? I shall be scrupulously accurate, and submit an audited account at Christmas. Even my worst enemies have never alleged dishonesty against me. Is it a bargain?”

“Y-yes,” she stammered confusedly, hardly knowing what he meant. He was leaning over the small table and looking steadfastly at her. She noticed that the wine and food had made his skin greasy. It suddenly occurred to her that Mark Bower resembled certain exotic plants which must be viewed from a distance if they would gratify the critical senses. The gloss of a careful toilet was gone. He was altogether cruder, coarser, more animal, since he had eaten, though his consumption of wine was quite moderate. His big, rather fierce eyes were more than prominent now; they bulged. Certain Jewish characteristics in his face had become accentuated. She remembered the ancient habit of anointing with oil, and laughed at the thought, for that was a little trick of hers to conceal nervousness.

“You doubt me, then?” he half whispered. “Or do you deem it beyond the power of finance to convert so small a sum into hundreds—it may be thousands—of pounds in six months?”

“Indeed I should credit you with ability to do that and more, Mr. Bower,” she said; “but I was wondering why you made such an offer to a mere acquaintance,—one whom it is more than likely you will never meet again.”

The phrase had a harsh and awkward sound in her ears. Bower, to her relief, seemed to ignore it.

“It is permissible to gratify an impulse once in awhile,” he countered. “And not to mention the audited accounts, there was a matter of theater tickets that should serve to bring us together again. Won’t you give me your address, in London if not in Switzerland? Here is mine.”

He produced a pocketbook, and picked out a card. It bore his name and his club. He added, in pencil, “50 Hamilton Place.”

“Letters sent to my house reach me, no matter where I may happen to be,” he said.

The incident brought fresh tremors to Helen. Indeed, the penciled address came as an unpleasant shock; for Millicent Jaques, on the day they met in Piccadilly, having gone home with Helen to tea, excused an early departure on the ground that she was due to dinner at that very house.

But she took the card, and strove desperately to appear at ease, for she had no cause to quarrel with one whose manners were so courteous.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “If you care to see my articles in the—in the paper, I shall send you copies. Now I must say good by. I am rather tired. Before I go let me say how deeply indebted I feel for your kindness to-day.”

She rose. Bower stood up too, and bowed with smiling deference. “Good night,” he said. “You will not be disturbed by the customs people at the frontier. I have arranged all that.”

Helen made the best of her way along the swaying corridors till she reached her section of the sleeping car; but Bower resumed his seat at the table. He ordered a glass of fine champagne and held it up to the light. There was a decided frown on his strong face, and the attendant who served him imagined that there was something wrong with the liqueur.

“N’est-ce pas bon, m’sieur?” he began.

“Will you go to the devil?” said Bower, speaking very slowly without looking at him.

“Oui, m’sieur, Je vous assure,” and the man disappeared.

It was not the wine, but the woman, that was perplexing him. Not often had the lure of gold failed so signally. And why was she so manifestly startled at the last moment? Had he gone too far? Was he mistaken in the assumption that Millicent Jaques had said little or nothing concerning him to her friend? And this commission too,—there were inexplicable features about it. He knew a great deal of the ways of newspapers, daily and weekly, and it was not the journalistic habit to send inexperienced young women on costly journeys to write up Swiss summer resorts.

He frowned still more deeply as he thought of the Maloja-Kulm Hotel, for Helen had innocently affixed a label bearing her address on her handbag. He peopled it with dozens of smart young men and not a few older beaux of his own type. His features relaxed somewhat when he remembered the women. Helen was alone, and far too good-looking to command sympathy. There should be the elements of trouble in that quarter. If he played his cards well, and he had no reason to doubt his skill, Helen should greet him as her best friend when he surprised her by appearing unexpectedly at the Maloja-Kulm.

Then he waxed critical. She was young, and lively, and unquestionably pretty; but was she worth all this planning and contriving? She was by way of being a prude too, and held serious notions of women’s place in the scheme of things. At any rate, the day’s hunting had not brought him far out of his path, Frankfort being his real objective, and he would make up his mind later. Perhaps she would remove all obstacles by writing to him on her return to London; but the recollection of her frank, clear gaze, of lips that were molded for strength as well as sweetness, of the dignity and grace with which the well shaped head was poised on a white firm neck, warned him that such a woman might surrender to love, but never to greed.

Then he laughed, and ordered another liqueur, and drank a toast to to-morrow, when all things come to pass for the man who knows how to contrive to-day.

In the early morning, at Basle, he awoke, and was somewhat angry with himself when he found that his thoughts still dwelt on Helen Wynton. In the cold gray glimmer of dawn, and after the unpleasant shaking his pampered body had received all night, some of the romance of this latest quest had evaporated. He was stiff and weary, and he regretted the whim that had led him a good twelve hours astray. But he roused himself and dressed with care. Some twenty minutes short of Zurich he sent an attendant to Miss Wynton’s berth to inquire if she would join him for early coffee at that station, there being a wait of a quarter of an hour before the train went on to Coire.

Helen, who was up and dressed, said she would be delighted. She too had been thinking, and, being a healthy-minded and kind-hearted girl, had come to the conclusion that her abrupt departure the previous night was wholly uncalled for and ungracious.

So it was with a smiling face that she awaited Bower on the steps of her carriage. She shook hands with him cordially, did not object in the least degree when he seized her arm to pilot her through a noisy crowd of foreigners, and laughed with utmost cheerfulness when they both failed to drink some extraordinarily hot coffee served in glasses that seemed to be hotter still.

Helen had the rare distinction of being quite as bright and pleasing to the eye in the searching light of the sun’s first rays as at any other hour. Bower, though spruce and dandified, looked rather worn.

“I did not sleep well,” he explained. “And the rails to the frontier on this line are the worst laid in Europe.”

“It is early yet,” she said. “Why not turn in again when you reach your hotel?”

“Perish the thought!” he cried. “I shall wander disconsolate by the side of the lake. Please say you will miss me at breakfast. And, by the way, you will find a table specially set apart for you. I suppose you change at Coire?”

“How kind and thoughtful you are. Yes, I am going to the Engadine, you know.”

“Well, give my greetings to the high Alps. I have climbed most of them in my time. More improbable things have happened than that I may renew the acquaintance with some of my old friends this year. What fun if you and I met on the Matterhorn or Jungfrau! But they are far away from the valley of the inn, and perhaps you do not climb.”

“I have never had the opportunity; but I mean to try. Moreover, it is part of my undertaking.”

“Then may we soon be tied to the same rope!”

Thus they parted, with cheery words, and, on Helen’s side, a genuine wish that they might renew a pleasant acquaintance. Bower waited on the platform to see the last of her as the train steamed away.

“Yes, it is worth while,” he muttered, when the white feathers on her hat were no longer visible. He did not go to the lake, but to the telegraph office, and there he wrote two long messages, which he revised carefully, and copied. Yet he frowned again, even while he was paying for their transmission. Never before had he taken such pains to win any woman’s regard. And the knowledge vexed him, for the taking of pains was not his way with women.

CHAPTER IV

HOW HELEN CAME TO MALOJA

At Coire, or Chur, as the three-tongued Swiss often term it—German being the language most in vogue in Switzerland—Helen found a cheerful looking mountain train awaiting the coming of its heavy brother from far off Calais. It was soon packed to the doors, for those Alpine valleys hum with life and movement during the closing days of July. Even in the first class carriages nearly every seat was filled in a few minutes, while pandemonium reigned in the cheaper sections.

Helen, having no cumbersome baggage to impede her movements, was swept in on the crest of the earliest wave, and obtained a corner near the corridor. She meant to leave her handbag there, stroll up and down the station for a few minutes, mainly to look at the cosmopolitan crowd, and perhaps buy some fruit; but the babel of English, German, French, and Italian, mixed with scraps of Russian and Czech, that raged round a distracted conductor warned her that the wiser policy was to sit still.

An Englishwoman, red faced, elderly, and important, was offered a center seat, facing the engine, in Helen’s compartment. She refused it. Her indignation was magnificent. To face the engine, she declared, meant instant illness.

“I never return to this wretched country that I do not regret it!” she shrilled. “Have you no telegraphs? Cannot your officials ascertain from Zurich how many English passengers may be expected, and make suitable provision for them?”

As this tirade was thrown away on the conductor, she proceeded to translate it into fairly accurate French; but the man was at his wits’ end to accommodate the throng, and said so, with the breathless politeness that such a grande dame seemed to merit.

“Then you should set apart a special train for passengers from England!” she declared vehemently. “I shall never come here again—never! The place is overrun with cheap tourists. Moreover, I shall tell all my friends to avoid Switzerland. Perhaps, when British patronage is withdrawn from your railways and hotels, you will begin to consider our requirements.”

Helen felt that her irate fellow countrywoman was metaphorically hurling large volumes of the peerage, baronetage, and landed gentry at the unhappy conductor’s head. Again he pointed out that there was a seat at madam’s service. When the train started he would do his best to secure another in the desired position.

As the woman, whose proportions were generous, was blocking the gangway, she received a forcible reminder from the end of a heavy portmanteau that she must clear out of the way. Breathing dire reprisals on the Swiss federal railway system, she entered unwillingly.

“Disgraceful!” she snorted. “A nation of boors! In another second I should have been thrown down and trampled on.”

A stolid German and his wife occupied opposite corners, and the man probably wondered why the Englischer frau glared at him so fiercely. But he did not move.

Helen, thinking to throw oil on the troubled waters, said pleasantly, “Won’t you change seats with me? I don’t mind whether I face the engine or not. In any case, I intend to stand in the corridor most of the time.”

The stout woman, hearing herself addressed in English, lifted her mounted eyeglasses and stared at Helen. In one sweeping glance she took in details. As it happened, the girl had expended fifteen of her forty pounds on a neat tailor made costume, a smart hat, well fitting gloves, and the best pair of walking boots she could buy; for, having pretty feet, it was a pardonable vanity that she should wish them well shod. Apparently, the other was satisfied that there would be no loss of caste in accepting the proffered civility.

“Thank you. I am very much obliged,” she said. “It is awfully sweet of you to incommode yourself for my sake.”

It was difficult to believe that the woman who had just stormed at the conductor, who had the effrontery to subject Helen to that stony scrutiny before she answered, could adopt such dulcet tones so suddenly. Helen, frank and generous-minded to a degree, would have preferred a gradual subsidence of wrath to this remarkable volte-face. But she reiterated that she regarded her place in a carriage as of slight consequence, and the change was effected.

The other adjusted her eyeglasses again, and passed in review the remaining occupants of the compartment. They were “foreigners,” whose existence might be ignored.

“This line grows worse each year,” she remarked, by way of a conversational opening. “It is horrid traveling alone. Unfortunately, I missed my son at Lucerne. Are your people on the train?”

“No. I too am alone.”

“Ah! Going to St. Moritz?”

“Yes; but I take the diligence there for Maloja.”

“The diligence! Who in the world advised that? Nobody ever travels that way.”

By “nobody,” she clearly conveyed the idea that she mixed in the sacred circle of “somebodies,” carriage folk to the soles of their boots, because Helen’s guidebook showed that a diligence ran twice daily through the Upper Engadine, and the Swiss authorities would not provide those capacious four-horsed vehicles unless there were passengers to fill them.

“Oh!” cried Helen. “Should I have ordered a carriage beforehand?”

“Most decidedly. But your friends will send one. They know you are coming by this train?”

Helen smiled. She anticipated a certain amount of cross examination at the hands of residents in the hotel; but she saw no reason why the ordeal should begin so soon.

“I must take my luck then,” she said. “There ought to be plenty of carriages at St. Moritz.”

Without being positively rude, her new acquaintance could not repeat the question thus shirked. But she had other shafts in her quiver.

“You will stay at the Kursaal, of course?” she said.

“Yes.”

“A passing visit, or for a period? I ask because I am going there myself.”

“Oh, how nice! I am glad I have met you. I mean to remain at Maloja until the end of August.”

“Quite the right time. The rest of Switzerland is unbearable in August. You will find the hotel rather full. The Burnham-Joneses are there,—the tennis players, you know,—and General and Mrs. Wragg and their family, and the de la Veres, nominally husband and wife,—a most charming couple individually. Have you met the de la Veres? No? Well, don’t be unhappy on Edith’s account if Reginald flirts with you. She likes it.”

“But perhaps I might not like it,” laughed Helen.

“Ah, Reginald has such fascinating manners!” A sigh seemed to deplore the days of long ago, when Reginald’s fascination might have displayed itself on her account.

Again there was a break in the flow of talk, and Helen began to take an interest in the scenery. Not to be balked, her inquisitor searched in a portmonnaie attached to her left wrist with a strap, and produced a card.

“We may as well know each other’s names,” she cooed affably. “Here is my card.”

Helen read, “Mrs. H. de Courcy Vavasour, Villa Menini, Nice.”

“I am sorry,” she said, with a friendly smile that might have disarmed prejudice, “but in the hurry of my departure from London I packed my cards in my registered baggage. My name is Helen Wynton.”

The eyeglasses went up once more.

“Do you spell it with an I? Are you one of the Gloucestershire Wintons?”

“No. I live in town; but my home is in Norfolk.”

“And whose party will you join at the Maloja?”

Helen colored a little under this rigorous heckling. “As I have already told you, Mrs. Vavasour, I am alone,” she said. “Indeed, I have come here to—to do some literary work.”

“For a newspaper?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Vavasour received this statement guardedly. If Helen was on the staff of an important journal there was something to be gained by being cited in her articles as one of the important persons “sojourning” in the Engadine.

“It is really wonderful,” she admitted, “how enterprising the great daily papers are nowadays.”

Helen, very new to a world of de Courcy Vavasours, and Wraggs, and Burnham-Joneses, forgave this hawklike pertinacity for sake of the apparent sympathy of her catechist. And she was painfully candid.

“The weekly paper I represent is not at all well known,” she explained; “but here I am, and I mean to enjoy my visit hugely. It is the chance of a lifetime to be sent abroad on such a mission. I little dreamed a week since that I should be able to visit this beautiful country under the best conditions without giving a thought to the cost.”

Poor Helen! Had she delved in many volumes to obtain material that would condemn her in the eyes of the tuft hunter she was addressing, she could not have shocked so many conventions in so few words. She was poor, unknown, unfriended! Worse than these negative defects, she was positively attractive! Mrs. Vavasour almost shuddered as she thought of the son “missed” at Lucerne, the son who would arrive at Maloja on the morrow, in the company of someone whom he preferred to his mother as a fellow traveler. What a pitfall she had escaped! She might have made a friend of this impossible person! Nevertheless, rendered wary by many social skirmishes, she did not declare war at once. The girl was too outspoken to be an adventuress. She must wait, and watch, and furbish her weapons.

Helen, whose brain was nimble enough to take in some of Mrs. Vavasour’s limitations, hoped that the preliminary inquiry into her caste was ended. She went into the corridor. A man made room for her with an alacrity that threatened an attempt to draw her into conversation, so she moved somewhat farther away, and gave herself to thought. If this prying woman was a fair sample of the people in the hotel, it was obvious that the human element in the high Alps held a suspicious resemblance to society in Bayswater, where each street is a faction and the clique in the “Terrace” is not on speaking terms with the clique in the “Gardens.” Thus far, she owned to a feeling of disillusionment in many respects.

Two years earlier, a naturalist in the Highlands had engaged von Eulenberg to classify his collection, and Helen had gone to Inverness with the professor’s family. She saw something then of the glories of Scotland, and her memories of the purple hills, the silvery lakes, the joyous burns tumbling headlong through woodland and pasture, were not dimmed by the dusty garishness of the Swiss scenery. True, Baedeker said that these pent valleys were suffocating in midsummer. She could only await in diminished confidence her first glimpse of the eternal snows.

And again, the holiday makers were not the blithesome creatures of her imagination. Some were reading, many sleeping, and the rest, for the most part, talking in strange tongues of anything but the beauties of the landscape. The Britons among them seemed to be brooding on glaciers. A party of lively Americans were playing bridge, and a scrap of gossip in English from a neighboring compartment revealed that some woman who went to a dance at Montreux, “wore a cheap voile, my dear, a last year’s bargain, all crumpled and dirty. You never saw such a fright!”

These things were trivial and commonplace; a wide gap opened between them and Helen’s day dreams of Alpine travel. By natural sequence of ideas she began to contrast her present loneliness with yesterday’s pleasant journey, and the outcome was eminently favorable to Mark Bower. She missed him. She was quite sure, had he accompanied her from Zurich, that he would have charmed away the dull hours with amusing anecdotes. Instead of feeling rather tired and sleepy, she would now be listening to his apt expositions of the habits and customs of the places and people seen from the carriage windows. For fully five minutes her expressive mouth betrayed a little moue of disappointment.

And then the train climbed a long spiral which gave a series of delightful views of a picturesque Swiss village,—exactly such a cluster of low roofed houses as she had admired many a time in photographs of Alpine scenery. An exclamation from a little boy who clapped his hands in ecstasy caused her to look through a cleft in the nearer hills. With a thrill of wonder she discovered there, remote and solitary, all garbed in shining white, a majestic snow capped mountain. Ah! this was the real Switzerland! Her heart throbbed, and her breath came in fluttering gasps of excitement. How mean and trivial were class distinctions in sight of nature’s nobility! She was uplifted, inspirited, filled with a sedate happiness. She wanted to voice her gladness as the child had done. A high pitched female voice said:

“Of course I had to call, because Jack meets her husband in the city; but it is an awful bore knowing such people.”

Then the train plunged into a noisome tunnel, and turned a complete circle in the heart of the rock, and when it panted into daylight again the tall square tower of the village church had sunk more deeply into the valley. Far beneath, two bright steel ribbons—swallowed by a cavernous mouth that belched clouds of dense smoke—showed the strangeness of the route that led to the silent peaks. At times the rails crossed or ran by the side of a white, tree lined track that mounted ever upward. Though she could not recall the name of the pass, Helen was aware that this was one of the fine mountain roads for which Switzerland is famous. Pedestrians, singly or in small parties, were trudging along sturdily. They seemed to be mostly German tourists, jolly, well fed folk, nearly as many women as men, each one carrying a rucksack and alpenstock, and evidently determined to cover a set number of kilometers before night.

“That is the way in which I should like to see the Alps,” thought Helen. “I am sure they sing as they walk, and they miss nothing of the grandeur and exquisite coloring of the hills. A train is very comfortable; but it certainly brings to these quiet valleys a great many people who would otherwise never come near them.”

The force of this trite reflection was borne in on her by a loud wrangle between the bridge players. A woman had revoked, and was quite wroth with the man who detected her mistake.

At the next stopping place Helen bought some chocolates, and made a friend of the boy, a tiny Parisian. The two found amusement in searching for patches of snow on the northerly sides of the nearest hills. Once they caught a glimpse of a whole snowy range, and they shrieked so enthusiastically that the woman whose husband was also in the city glanced at them with disapproval, as they interrupted a full and particular if not true account of the quarrel between the Firs and the Limes.

At last the panting engine gathered speed and rushed along a wide valley into Samaden, Celerina, and St. Moritz. Mrs. Vavasour seemed to be absorbed in a Tauchnitz novel till the last moment, and the next sight of her vouchsafed to Helen was her departure from the terminus in solitary state in a pair-horse victoria. It savored somewhat of unkindness that she had not offered to share the roomy vehicle with one who had befriended her.

“Perhaps she was afraid I might not pay my share of the hire,” said Helen to herself rather indignantly. But a civil hotel porter helped her to clear the customs shed rapidly, secured a comfortable carriage, advised her confidentially as to the amount that should be paid, and promised to telephone to the hotel for a suitable room. She was surprised to find how many of her fellow passengers were bound for Maloja. Some she had encountered at various stages of the journey all the way from London, while many, like Mrs. Vavasour, had joined the train in Switzerland. She remembered too, with a quiet humor that had in it a spice of sarcasm, that her elderly acquaintance had not come from England, and had no more right to demand special accommodation at Coire than the dozens of other travelers who put in an appearance at each station after Basle.

She noticed that as soon as the luggage was handed to the driver to be strapped behind each vehicle, the newcomers nearly all went to a neighboring hotel for luncheon. Being a healthy young person, and endowed with a sound digestion, Helen deemed this example too good not to be followed. Then she began a two hours’ drive through a valley that almost shook her allegiance to Scotland. The driver, a fine looking old man, with massive features and curling gray hair that reminded her of Michelangelo’s head of Moses, knowing the nationality of his fare, resolutely refused to speak any other language than English. He would jerk round, flourish his whip, and cry:

“Dissa pless St. Moritz Bad; datta pless St. Moritz Dorp.”

Soon he announced the “Engelish kirch,” thereby meaning the round arched English church overlooking the lake; or it might be, with a loftier sweep of the whip, “Piz Julier montin, mit lek Silvaplaner See.”

All this Helen could have told him with equal accuracy and even greater detail. Had she not almost learned by heart each line of Baedeker on the Upper Engadine? Could she not have reproduced from memory a fairly complete map of the valley, with its villages, mountains, and lakes clearly marked? But she would not on any account repress the man’s enthusiasm, and her eager acceptance of his quaint information induced fresh efforts, with more whip waving.

“Piz Corvatsch! Him ver’ big fellow. Twelf t’ousen foots. W’en me guide him bruk ze leg.”

She had seen that he was very lame as he hobbled about the carriage tying up her boxes. So here was a real guide. That explained his romantic aspect, his love of the high places. And he had been maimed for life by that magnificent mountain whose scarred slopes were now vividly before her eyes. The bright sunshine lit lakes and hills with its glory. A marvelous atmosphere made all things visible with microscopic fidelity. From Campfer to Silvaplana looked to be a ten minutes’ drive, and from Silvaplana to Sils-Maria another quarter of an hour. Helen had to consult her watch and force herself to admit that the horses were trotting fully seven miles an hour before she realized that distances could be so deceptive. The summit of the lordly Corvatsch seemed to be absurdly near. She judged it within the scope of an easy walk between breakfast and afternoon tea from the hotel on a tree covered peninsula that stretched far out into Lake Sils-Maria, and she wondered why anyone should fall and break his leg during such a simple climb. Just to make sure, she glanced at the guidebook, and it gave her a shock when she saw the words, “Guides necessary,”—“Descent to Sils practicable only for experts,”—“Spend night at Roseg Inn,”—the route followed being that from Pontresina.

Then she recollected that the lovely valley she was traversing from beginning to end was itself six thousand feet above sea level,—that the observatory on rugged old Ben Nevis, which she had visited when in Scotland, was, metaphorically speaking, two thousand feet beneath the smooth road along which she was being driven, and that the highest peak on Corvatsch was still six thousand feet above her head. All at once, Helen felt subdued. The fancy seized her that the carriage was rumbling over the roof of the world. In a word, she was yielding to the exhilaration of high altitudes, and her brain was ready to spin wild fantasies.

At Sils-Maria she was brought suddenly to earth again. It must not be forgotten that her driver was a St. Moritz man, and therefore at constant feud with the men from the Kursaal, who brought empty carriages to St. Moritz, and went back laden with the spoil that would otherwise have fallen to the share of the local livery stables. Hence, he made it a point of honor to pass every Maloja owned vehicle on the road. Six times he succeeded, but, on the seventh, reversing the moral of Bruce’s spider, he smashed the near hind wheel by attempting to slip between a landau and a stone post. Helen was almost thrown into the lake, and, for the life of her, she could not repress a scream. But the danger passed as rapidly as it had risen, and all that happened was that the carriage settled down lamely by the side of the road, with its weight resting on one of her boxes.

The driver spoke no more English. He bewailed his misfortune in free and fluent Italian of the Romansch order.

But he understood German, and when Helen demanded imperatively that he should unharness the horses, and help to prop the carriage off a crumpled tin trunk that contained her best dresses, he recovered his senses, worked willingly, and announced with a weary grin that if the gnädische fräulein would wait a little half-hour he would obtain another wheel from a neighboring forge.

Having recovered from her fright she was so touched by the poor fellow’s distress that she promised readily to stand by him until repairs were effected. It was a longer job than either of them anticipated. The axle was slightly bent, and a blacksmith had to bring clamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Even then it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. The concluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail’s pace, and Helen reflected ruefully that it was possible to “bruk ze leg” on the level high road as well as on the rocks of Corvatsch.

Of course, she received offers of assistance in plenty. Every carriage that passed while the blacksmith was at work pulled up and placed a seat therein at her command. But she refused them all. It was not that she feared to desert her baggage, for Switzerland is proverbially honest. The unlucky driver had tried to be friendly; his fault was due to an excess of zeal; and each time she declined the proffered help his furrowed face brightened. If she did not reach the hotel until midnight she was determined to go there in that vehicle, and in none other.

The accident threw her late, but only by some two hours. Instead of arriving at Maloja in brilliant sunshine, it was damp and chilly when she entered the hotel. A bank of mist had been carried over the summit of the pass by a southwesterly wind. Long before the carriage crawled round the last great bend in the road the glorious panorama of lake and mountains was blotted out of sight. The horses seemed to be jogging on through a luminous cloud, so dense that naught was visible save a few yards of roadway and the boundary wall or stone posts on the left side, where lay the lake. The brightness soon passed, as the hurrying fog wraiths closed in on each other. It became bitterly cold too, and it was with intense gladness that Helen finally stepped from the outer gloom into a glass haven of warmth and light that formed a species of covered-in veranda in front of the hotel.

She was about to pay the driver, having added to the agreed sum half the cost of the broken wheel by way of a solatium, when another carriage drove up from the direction of St. Moritz.

She fancied that the occupant, a young man whom she had never seen before, glanced at her as though he knew her. She looked again to make sure; but by that time his eyes were turned away, so he had evidently discovered his mistake. Still, he seemed to take considerable interest in her carriage, and Helen, ever ready to concede the most generous interpretation of doubtful acts, assumed that he had heard of the accident by some means, and was on the lookout for her.

It would indeed have been a fortunate thing for Helen had some Swiss fairy whispered the news of her mishap in Spencer’s ears during the long drive up the mist laden valley. Then, at least, he might have spoken to her, and used the informal introduction to make her further acquaintance on the morrow. But the knowledge was withheld from him. No hint of it was even flashed through space by that wireless telegraphy which has existed between kin souls ever since men and women contrived to raise human affinities to a plane not far removed from the divine.

He had small store of German, but he knew enough to be perplexed by the way in which Helen’s driver expressed “beautiful thanks” for her gift. The man seemed to be at once grateful and downhearted. Of course, the impression was of the slightest, but Spencer had been trained in reaching vital conclusions on meager evidence. He could not wait to listen to Helen’s words, so he passed into the hotel, having the American habit of leaving the care of his baggage to the hall porter. He wondered why Helen was so late in arriving that he had caught her up on the very threshold of the Kursaal, so to speak. He would not forget the driver’s face, and if he met the man again, it might be possible to find out the cause of the delay. He himself was before time. The federal railway authorities at Coire, awaking to the fact that the holiday rush was beginning, had actually dispatched a relief train to St. Moritz when the second important train of the day turned up as full as its predecessor.

At dinner Helen and he sat at little tables in the same section of the huge dining hall. The hotel was nearly full, and it was noticeable that they were the only persons who dined alone. Indeed, the head waiter asked Spencer if he cared to join a party of men who sat together; but he declined. There was no such general gathering of women; so Helen was given no alternative, and she ate the meal in silence.

She saw Mrs. Vavasour in a remote part of the salon. With her was a vacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continually addressing remarks to a woman at another table.

“That is the son lost at Lucerne,” she decided, finding in his face some of the physical traits but none of the calculating shrewdness of his mother.

After a repast of many courses Helen wandered into the great hall, found an empty chair, and longed for someone to speak to. At the first glance, everybody seemed to know everybody else. That was not really the case, of course. There were others present as neglected and solitary as Helen; but the noise and merriment of the greater number dominated the place. It resembled a social club rather than a hotel.

Her chair was placed in an alley along which people had to pass who wished to reach the glass covered veranda. She amused herself by trying to pick out the Wraggs, the Burnham-Joneses, and the de la Veres. Suddenly she was aware that Mrs. Vavasour and her son were coming that way; the son unwillingly, the mother with an air of determination. Perhaps the Lucerne episode was about to be explained.

When young Vavasour’s eyes fell on Helen, the boredom vanished from his face. It was quite obvious that he called his mother’s attention to her and asked who she was. Helen felt that an introduction was imminent. She was glad of it. At that moment she would have chatted gayly with even a greater ninny than George de Courcy Vavasour.

But she had not yet grasped the peculiar idiosyncrasies of a woman who was famous for snubbing those whom she considered to be “undesirables.” Helen looked up with a shy smile, expecting that the older woman would stop and speak; but Mrs. Vavasour gazed at her blankly—looked at the back of her chair through her body—and walked on.

“I don’t know, George,” Helen heard her say. “There are a lot of new arrivals. Some person of no importance, rather déclassée, I should imagine by appearances. As I was telling you, the General has arranged——”

Taken altogether, Helen had crowded into portions of two days many new and some very unpleasant experiences.

CHAPTER V

AN INTERLUDE

Helen rose betimes next morning; but she found that the sun had kept an earlier tryst. Not a cloud marred a sky of dazzling blue. The phantom mist had gone with the shadows. From her bed room window she could see the whole length of the Ober-Engadin, till the view was abruptly shut off by the giant shoulders of Lagrev and Rosatch. The brilliance of the coloring was the landscape’s most astounding feature. The lakes were planes of polished turquoise, the rocks pure grays and browns and reds, the meadows emerald green, while the shining white patches of snow on the highest mountain slopes helped to blacken by contrast the somber clumps of pines that gathered thick wherever man had not disputed with the trees the tenancy of each foot of meager loam.

This morning glory of nature gladdened the girl’s heart and drove from it the overnight vapors. She dressed hurriedly, made a light breakfast, and went out.

There was no need to ask the way. In front of the hotel the narrow Silser See filled the valley. Close behind lay the crest of the pass. A picturesque château was perched on a sheer rock overhanging the Vale of Bregaglia and commanding a far flung prospect almost to the brink of Como. On both sides rose the mountain barriers; but toward the east there was an inviting gorge, beyond which the lofty Cima di Rosso flung its eternal snows heavenward.

A footpath led in that direction. Helen, who prided herself on her sense of locality, decided that it would bring her to the valley in which were situated, as she learned by the map, a small lake and a glacier.

“That will be a fine walk before lunch,” she said, “and it is quite impossible to lose the way.”

So she set off, crossing the hotel golf course, and making for a typical Swiss church that crowned the nearest of the foothills. Passing the church, she found the double doors in the porch open, and peeped in. It was a cozy little place, cleaner and less garish than such edifices are usually on the Continent. The lamp burning before the sanctuary showed that it was devoted to Roman Catholic worship. The red gleam of the tiny sentinel conveyed a curiously vivid impression of faith and spirituality. Though Helen was a Protestant, she was conscious of a benign emotion arising from the presence of this simple token of belief.

“I must ascertain the hours of service,” she thought. “It will be delightful to join the Swiss peasants in prayer. One might come near the Creator in this rustic tabernacle.”

She did not cross the threshold of the inner door. At present her mind was fixed on brisk movement in the marvelous air. She wanted to absorb the sunshine, to dispel once and for all the unpleasing picture of life in the high Alps presented by the stupid crowd she had met in the hotel overnight. Of course, she was somewhat unjust there; but women are predisposed to trust first impressions, and Helen was no exception to her sex.

Beyond the church the path was not so definite. Oddly enough, it seemed to go along the flat top of a low wall down to a tiny mountain stream. Steps were cut in the opposite hillside, but they were little used, and higher up, among some dwarf pines and azaleas, a broader way wound back toward the few scattered chalets that nestled under the château.

As the guidebook spoke of a carriage road to Lake Cavloccio, and a bridle path thence to within a mile of the Forno glacier, she came to the conclusion that she was taking a short cut. At any rate, on the summit of the next little hill she would be able to see her way quite distinctly, so she jumped across the brook and climbed through the undergrowth. Before she had gone twenty yards she stopped. She was almost certain that someone was sobbing bitterly up there among the trees. It had an uncanny sound, this plaint of grief in such a quiet, sunlit spot. Still, sorrow was not an affrighting thing to Helen. It might stir her sympathies, but it assuredly could not drive her away in panic.

She went on, not noiselessly, as she did not wish to intrude on some stranger’s misery. Soon she came to a low wall, and, before she quite realized her surroundings, she was looking into a grass grown cemetery. It was a surprise, this ambush of the silent company among the trees. Hidden away from the outer world, and so secluded that its whereabouts remain unknown to thousands of people who visit the Maloja each summer, there was an aspect of stealth in its sudden discovery that was almost menacing. But Helen was not a nervous subject. The sobbing had ceased, and when the momentary effect of such a depressing environment had been resolutely driven off, she saw that a rusty iron gate was open. The place was very small. There were a few monuments, so choked with weeds and dank grass that their inscriptions were illegible. She had never seen a more desolate graveyard. Despite the vivid light and the joyous breeze rustling the pine branches, its air of abandonment was depressing. She fought against the sensation as unworthy of her intelligence; but she had some reason for it in the fact that there was no visible explanation of the mourning she had undoubtedly heard.

Then she uttered an involuntary cry, for a man’s head and shoulders rose from behind a leafy shrub. Instantly she was ashamed of her fear. It was the old guide who acted as coachman the previous evening, and he had been lying face downward on the grass in that part of the cemetery given over to the unnamed dead.

He recognized her at once. Struggling awkwardly to his feet, he said in broken and halting German, “I pray your forgiveness, fräulein. I fear I have alarmed you.”

“It is I who should ask forgiveness,” she said. “I came here by accident. I thought I could go to Cavloccio by this path.”

She could have hit on no other words so well calculated to bring him back to every day life. To direct the steps of wanderers in his beloved Engadine was a real pleasure to him. For an instant he forgot that they had both spoken German.

“No, no!” he cried animatedly. “For lek him go by village. Bad road dissa way. No cross ze field. Verboten!”

Then Helen remembered that trespassers are sternly warned off the low lying lands in the mountains. Grass is scarce and valuable. Until the highest pastures yield to the arid rock, pedestrians must keep to the beaten track.

“I was quite mistaken,” she said. “I see now that the path I was trying to reach leads here only. And I am very, very sorry I disturbed you.”

“I fear I have alarmed you, fräulein.”
Page [88]

He hobbled nearer, the ruin of a fine man, with a nobly proportioned head and shoulders, but sadly maimed by the accident which, to all appearances, made him useless as a guide.

“Pardon an old man’s folly, fräulein,” he said humbly. “I thought none could hear, and I felt the loss of my little girl more than ever to-day.”

“Your daughter? Is she buried here?”

“Yes. Many a year has passed; but I miss her now more than ever. She was all I had in the world, fräulein. I am alone now, and that is a hard thing when the back is bent with age.”

Helen’s eyes grew moist; but she tried bravely to control her voice. “Was she young?” she asked softly.

“Only twenty, fräulein, only twenty, and as tall and fair as yourself. They carried her here sixteen years ago this very day. I did not even see her. On the previous night I fell on Corvatsch.”

“Oh, how sad! But why did she die at that age? And in this splendid climate? Was her death unexpected?”

“Unexpected!” He turned and looked at the huge mountain of which the cemetery hill formed one of the lowermost buttresses. “If the Piz della Margna were to topple over and crush me where I stand, it would be less unforeseen than was my sweet Etta’s fate. But I frighten you, lady,—a poor return for your kindness. That is your way,—through the village, and by the postroad till you reach a notice board telling you where to take the path.”

There was a crude gentility in his manner that added to the pathos of his words. Helen was sure that he wished to be left alone with his memories. Yet she lingered.

“Please tell me your name,” she said. “I may visit St. Moritz while I remain here, and I shall try to find you.”

“Christian Stampa,” he said. He seemed to be on the point of adding something, but checked himself. “Christian Stampa,” he repeated, after a pause. “Everybody knows old Stampa the guide. If I am not there, and you go to Zermatt some day—well, just ask for Stampa. They will tell you what has become of me.”

She found it hard to reconcile this broken, careworn old man with her cheery companion of the previous afternoon. What did he mean? She understood his queer jargon of Italianized German quite clearly; but there was a sinister ring in his words that blanched her face. She could not leave him in his present mood. She was more alarmed now than when she saw him rising ghostlike from behind the screen of grass and weeds.

“Please walk with me to the village,” she said. “All this beautiful land is strange to me. It will divert your thoughts from a mournful topic if you tell me something of its wonders.”

He looked at her for an instant. Then his eyes fell on the church in the neighboring hollow, and he crossed himself, murmuring a few words in Italian. She guessed their meaning. He was thanking the Virgin for having sent to his rescue a girl who reminded him of his lost Etta.

“Yes,” he said, “I will come. If I were remaining in the Maloja, fräulein, I would beg you to let me take you to the Forno, and perhaps to one of the peaks beyond. Old as I am, and lame, you would be safe with me.”

Helen breathed freely again. She felt that she had been within measurable distance of a tragedy. Nor was there any call on her wits to devise fresh means of drawing his mind away from the madness that possessed him a few minutes earlier. As he limped unevenly by her side, his talk was of the mountains. Did she intend to climb? Well, slow and sure was the golden rule. Do little or nothing during four or five days, until she had grown accustomed to the thin and keen Alpine air. Then go to Lake Lunghino,—that would suffice for the first real excursion. Next day, she ought to start early, and climb the mountain overlooking that same lake,—up there, on the other side of the hotel,—all rock and not difficult. If the weather was clear, she would have a grand view of the Bernina range. Next she might try the Forno glacier. It was a simple thing. She could go to and from the cabane in ten hours. Afterward, the Cima di Rosso offered an easy climb; but that meant sleeping at the hut. All of which was excellent advice, though the reflection came that Stampa’s “slow and sure” methods were not strongly in evidence some sixteen hours earlier.

Now, the Cima di Rosso was in full view at that instant. Helen stopped.

“Do you really mean to tell me that if I wish to reach the top of that mountain, I must devote two days to it?” she cried.

Stampa, though bothered with troubles beyond her ken, forgot them sufficiently to laugh grimly. “It is farther away than you seem to think, fräulein; but the real difficulty is the ice. Unless you cross some of the crevasses in the early morning, before the sun has had time to undo the work accomplished by the night’s frost, you run a great risk. And that is why you must be ready to start from the cabane at dawn. Moreover, at this time of year, you get the finest view about six o’clock.”

The mention of crevasses was somewhat awesome. “Is it necessary to be roped when one tries that climb?” she asked.

“If any guide ever tells you that you need not be roped while crossing ice or climbing rock, turn back at once, fräulein. Wait for another day, and go with a man who knows his business. That is how the Alps get a bad name for accidents. Look at me! I have climbed the Matterhorn forty times, and the Jungfrau times out of count, and never did I or anyone in my care come to grief. ‘Use the rope properly,’ is my motto, and it has never failed me, not even when two out of five of us were struck senseless by falling stones on the south side of Monte Rosa.”

Helen experienced another thrill. “I very much object to falling stones,” she said.

Stampa threw out his hands in emphatic gesture. “What can one do?” he cried. “They are always a danger, like the snow cornice and the névé. There is a chimney on the Jungfrau through which stones are constantly shooting from a height of two thousand feet. You cannot see them,—they travel too fast for the eye. You hear something sing past your ears, that is all. Occasionally there is a report like a gunshot, and then you observe a little cloud of dust rising from a new scar on a rock. If you are hit—well, there is no dust, because the stone goes right through. Of course one does not loiter there.”

Then, seeing the scared look on her face, he went on. “Ladies should not go to such places. It is not fit. But for men, yes. There is the joy of battle. Do not err, fräulein,—the mountains are alive. And they fight to the death. They can be beaten; but there must be no mistakes. They are like strong men, the hills. When you strive against them, strain them to your breast and never relax your grip. Then they yield slowly, with many a trick and false move that a man must learn if he would look down over them all and say, ‘I am lord here.’ Ah me! Shall I ever again cross the Col du Lion or climb the Great Tower? But there! I am old, and thrown aside. Boys whom I engaged as porters would refuse me now as their porter. Better to have died like my friend, Michel Croz, than live to be a goatherd.”

He seemed to pull himself up with an effort. “That way—to your left—you cannot miss the path. Addio, sigñorina,” and he lifted his hat with the inborn grace of the peasantry of Southern Europe.

Helen was hoping that he might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio. She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables, she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while descending the Matterhorn after having made the first ascent. That historic accident happened long before she was born. To hear a man speak of Croz as a friend sounded almost unbelievable, though a moment’s thought told her that Whymper, who led the attack on the hitherto impregnable Cervin on that July day in 1865, was still living, a keen Alpinist.

She could not refrain from asking Stampa one question, though she imagined that he was now in a hurry to take the damaged carriage back to St. Moritz. “Michel Croz was a brave man,” she said. “Did you know him well?”

“I worshiped him, fräulein,” was the reverent answer. “May I receive pardon in my last hour, but I took him for an evil spirit on the day of his death! I was with Jean Antoine Carrel in Signor Giordano’s party. We started from Breuil, Croz and his voyageurs from Zermatt. We failed; he succeeded. When we saw him and his Englishmen on the summit, we believed they were devils, because they yelled in triumph, and started an avalanche of stones to announce their victory. Three days later, Carrel and I, with two men from Breuil, tried again. We gained the top that time, and passed the place where Croz was knocked over by the English milord and the others who fell with him. I saw three bodies on the glacier four thousand feet below,—a fine burial-ground, better than that up there.”

He looked back at the pines which now hid the cemetery wall from sight. Then, with another courteous sweep of his hat, he walked away, covering the ground rapidly despite his twisted leg.

If Helen had been better trained as a woman journalist, she would have regarded this meeting with Stampa as an incident of much value. Long experience of the lights and shades of life might have rendered her less sensitive. As it was, the man’s personality appealed to her. She had been vouchsafed a glimpse into an abyss profound as that into which Stampa himself peered on the day he discovered three of the four who fell from the Matterhorn still roped together in death. The old man’s simple references to the terrors lurking in those radiant mountains had also shaken her somewhat. The snow capped Cima di Rosso no longer looked so attractive. The Orlegna Gorge had lost some of its beauty. Though the sun was pouring into its wooded depths, it had grown gloomy and somber in her eyes. Yielding to impulse, she loitered in the village, took the carriage road to the château, and sat there, with her back to the inner heights and her gaze fixed on the smiling valley that opened toward Italy out of the Septimer Pass.

Meanwhile, Stampa hurried past the stables, where his horses were munching the remains of the little oaten loaves which form the staple food of hard worked animals in the Alps. He entered the hotel by the main entrance, and was on his way to the manager’s bureau, when Spencer, smoking on the veranda, caught sight of him.

Instantly the American started in pursuit. By this time he had heard of Helen’s accident from one of yesterday’s passers by. It accounted for the delay; but he was anxious to learn exactly what had happened.

Stampa reached the office first. He was speaking to the manager, when Spencer came in and said in his downright way:

“This is the man who drove Miss Wynton from St. Moritz last night. I don’t suppose I shall be able to understand what he says. Will you kindly ask him what caused the trouble?”

“It is quite an easy matter,” was the smiling response. “Poor Stampa is not only too eager to pass every other vehicle on the road, but he is inclined to watch the mountains rather than his horses’ ears. He was a famous guide once; but he met with misfortune, and took to carriage work as a means of livelihood. He has damaged his turnout twice this year; so this morning he was dismissed by telephone, and another driver is coming from St. Moritz to take his place.”

Spencer looked at Stampa. He liked the strong, worn face, with its half wistful, half resigned expression. An uneasy feeling gripped him that the whim of a moment in the Embankment Hotel might exert its crazy influence in quarters far removed from the track that seemed then to be so direct and pleasure-giving.

“Why did he want to butt in between the other fellow and the landscape? What was the hurry, anyhow?” he asked.

Stampa smiled genially when the questions were translated to him. “I was talking to the sigñorina,” he explained, using his native tongue, for he was born on the Italian side of the Bernina.

“That counts, but it gives no good reason why he should risk her life,” objected Spencer.

Stampa’s weather furrowed cheeks reddened. “There was no danger,” he muttered wrathfully. “Madonna! I would lose the use of another limb rather than hurt a hair of her head. Is she not my good angel? Has she not drawn me back from the gate of hell? Risk her life! Are people saying that because a worm-eaten wheel went to pieces against a stone?”

“What on earth is he talking about?” demanded Spencer. “Has he been pestering Miss Wynton this morning with some story of his present difficulties?”

The manager knew Stampa’s character. He put the words in kindlier phrase. “Does the sigñorina know that you have lost your situation?” he said.

Even in that mild form, the suggestion annoyed the old man. He flung it aside with scornful gesture, and turned to leave the office. “Tell the gentleman to go to Zermatt and ask in the street if Christian Stampa the guide would throw himself on a woman’s charity,” he growled.

Spencer did not wait for any interpretation. “Hold on,” he said quietly. “What is he going to do now? Work, for a man of his years, doesn’t grow on gooseberry bushes, I suppose.”

“Christian, Christian! You are hot-headed as a boy,” cried the manager. “The fact is,” he went on, “he came to me to offer his services. But I have already engaged more drivers than I need, and I am dismissing some stable men. Perhaps he can find a job in St. Moritz.”

“Are his days as guide ended?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I believe he is as active as ever; but people won’t credit it. And you cannot blame them. When one’s safety depends on a man who may have to cling to an ice covered rock like a fly to a window-pane, one is apt to distrust a crooked leg.”

“Did he have an accident?”

The manager hesitated. “It is part of his sad history,” he said. “He fell, and nearly killed himself; but he was hurrying to see the last of a daughter to whom he was devoted.”

“Is he a local man, then?”

“No. Oh, no! The girl happened to be here when the end came.”

“Well, I guess he will suit my limited requirements in the fly and window-pane business while I remain in Maloja,” said Spencer. “Tell him I am willing to put up ten francs a day and extras for his exclusive services as guide during my stay.”

Poor Stampa was nearly overwhelmed by this unexpected good fortune. In his agitation he blurted out, “Ah, then, the good God did really send an angel to my help this morning!”

Spencer, however, reviewing his own benevolence over a pipe outside the hotel, expressed the cynical opinion that the hot sun was affecting his brain. “I’m on a loose end,” he communed. “Next time I waft myself to Europe on a steamer I’ll bring my mother. It would be a bully fine notion to cable for her right away. I want someone to take care of me. It looks as if I had a cinch on running this hotel gratis. What in thunder will happen next?”

He could surely have answered that query if he had the least inkling of the circumstances governing Helen’s prior meeting with Stampa. As it was, the development of events followed the natural course. While Spencer strolled off by the side of the lake, the old guide lumbered into the village street, and waited there, knowing that he would waylay the bella Inglesa on her return. Though she came from the château and not from Cavloccio, he did not fail to see her.

At first she was at a loss to fathom the cause of Stampa’s delight, and still less to understand why he should want to thank her with such exuberance. She imagined he was overjoyed at having gone back to his beloved profession, and it was only by dint of questioning that she discovered the truth. Then it dawned on her that the man had been goaded to desperation by the curt message from St. Moritz,—that he was sorely tempted to abandon the struggle, and follow into the darkness the daughter taken from him so many years ago,—and the remembrance of her suspicion when they were about to part at the cemetery gate lent a serious note to her words of congratulation.

“You see, Stampa,” she said, “you were very wrong to lose faith this morning. At the very moment of your deepest despair Heaven was providing a good friend for you.”

“Yes, indeed, fräulein. That is why I waited here. I felt that I must thank you. It was all through you. The good God sent you——”

“I think you are far more beholden to the gentleman who employed you than to me,” she broke in.

“Yes, he is splendid, the young voyageur; but it was wholly on your account, lady. He was angry with me at first, because he thought I placed you in peril in the matter of the wheel.”

Helen was amazed. “He spoke of me?” she cried.

“Ah, yes. He did not say much, but his eyes looked through me. He has the eyes of a true man, that young American.”

She was more bewildered than ever. “What is his name?” she asked.

“Here it is. The director wrote it for me, so that I may learn how to pronounce it.”

Stampa produced a scrap of paper, and Helen read, “Mr. Charles K. Spencer.”

“Are you quite certain he mentioned me?” she repeated.

“Can I be mistaken, fräulein. I know, because I studied the labels on your boxes. Mees Hélène Weenton—so? And did he not rate me about the accident?”

“Well, wonders will never cease,” she vowed; and indeed they were only just beginning in her life, which shows how blind to excellent material wonders can be.

At luncheon she summoned the head waiter. “Is there a Mr. Charles K. Spencer staying in the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes, madam.”

“Will you please tell me if he is in the room?”

The head waiter turned. Spencer was studying the menu. “Yes, madam. There he is, sitting alone, at the second table from the window.”

It was quite to be expected that the subject of their joint gaze should look at them instantly. There is a magnetism in the human eye that is unfailing in that respect, and its power is increased a hundredfold when a charming young woman tries it on a young man who happens to be thinking of her at the moment.

Then Spencer realized that Stampa had told Helen what had taken place in the hotel bureau, and he wanted to kick himself for having forgotten to make secrecy a part of the bargain.

Helen, knowing that he knew, blushed furiously. She tried to hide her confusion by murmuring something to the head waiter. But in her heart she was saying, “Who in the world is he? I have never seen him before last night. And why am I such an idiot as to tremble all over just because he happened to catch me looking at him?”

CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLEFIELD

Both man and woman were far too well bred to indulge in an œillade. The knowledge that each was thinking of the other led rather to an ostentatious avoidance of anything that could be construed into any such flirtatious overture.

Though Stampa’s curious statement had puzzled Helen, she soon hit on the theory that the American must have heard of the accident to her carriage. Yes, that supplied a ready explanation. No doubt he kept a sharp lookout for her on the road. He arrived at the hotel almost simultaneously with herself, and she had not forgotten his somewhat inquiring glance as they stood together on the steps. With the chivalry of his race in all things concerning womankind, he was eager to render assistance, and under the circumstances he probably wondered what sort of damsel in distress it was that needed help. It was natural enough too that in engaging Stampa he should refer to the carelessness that brought about the collapse of the wheel. Really, when one came to analyze an incident seemingly inexplicable, it resolved itself into quite commonplace constituents.

She found it awkward that he should be sitting between her and a window commanding the best view of the lake. If Spencer had been at any other table, she could have feasted her eyes on the whole expanse of the Ober-Engadin Valley. Therefore she had every excuse for looking that way, whereas he had none for gazing at her. Spencer appeared to be aware of this disability. For lack of better occupation he scrutinized the writing on the menu with a prolonged intentness worthy of a gourmand or an expert graphologist.

Helen rose first, and that gave him an opportunity to note her graceful carriage. Though born in the States, he was of British stock, and he did not share the professed opinion of the American humorist that the typical Englishwoman is angular, has large feet, and does not know how to walk. Helen, at any rate, betrayed none of these elements of caricature. Though there were several so-called “smart” women in the hotel,—women who clung desperately to the fringe of Society on both sides of the Atlantic,—his protégée was easily first among the few who had any claim to good looks.

Helen was not only tall and lithe, but her movements were marked by a quiet elegance. It was her custom, in nearly all weathers, to walk from Bayswater to Professor von Eulenberg’s study, which, needless to say, was situated near the British Museum. She usually returned by a longer route, unless pelting rain or the misery of London snow made the streets intolerable. Thus there was hardly a day that she did not cover eight miles at a rapid pace, a method of training that eclipsed all the artifices of beauty doctors and schools of deportment. Her sweetly pretty face, her abundance of shining brown hair, her slim, well proportioned figure, and the almost athletic swing of her well arched shoulders, would entitle her to notice in a gathering of beauties far more noted than those who graced Maloja with their presence that year. In addition to these physical attractions she carried with her the rarer and indefinable aura of the born aristocrat. As it happened, she merited that description both by birth and breeding; but there is a vast company entitled to consideration on that score to whom nature has cruelly denied the necessary hallmarks—otherwise the pages of Burke would surely be embellished with portraits.

Indeed, so far as appearance went, it was rather ludicrous to regard Helen as the social inferior of any person then resident in the Kursaal, and it is probable that a glimmering knowledge of this fact inflamed Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour’s wrath to boiling point, when a few minutes later, she saw her son coolly walk up to the “undesirable” and enter into conversation with her.

Helen was seated in a shady corner. A flood of sunlight filled the glass covered veranda with a grateful warmth. She had picked up an astonishingly well written and scholarly guide book issued by the proprietors of the hotel, and was deep in its opening treatise on the history and racial characteristics of the Engadiners, when she was surprised at hearing herself addressed by name.

“Er—Miss—er—Wynton, I believe?” said a drawling voice.

Looking up, she found George de Courcy Vavasour bending over her in an attitude that betokened the utmost admiration for both parties to the tête-à-tête. Under ordinary conditions,—that is to say, if Vavasour’s existence depended on his own exertions,—Helen’s eyes would have dwelt on a gawky youth endowed with a certain pertness that might in time have brought him from behind the counter of a drapery store to the wider arena of the floor. As it was, a reasonably large income gave him unbounded assurance, and his credit with a good tailor was unquestionable. He represented a British product that flourishes best in alien soil. There exists a foreign legion of George de Courcy Vavasours, flaccid heroes of fashion plates, whose parade grounds change with the seasons from Paris to the Riviera, and from the Riviera to some nook in the Alps. Providence and a grandfather have conspired in their behalf to make work unnecessary; but Providence, more far-seeing than grandfathers, has decreed that they shall be effete and light brained, so the type does not endure.

Helen, out of the corner of her eye, became aware that Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour was advancing with all the plumes of the British matron ruffled for battle. It was not in human nature that the girl should not recall the slight offered her the previous evening. With the thought came the temptation to repay it now with interest; but she thrust it aside.

“Yes, that is my name,” she said, smiling pleasantly.

“Well—er—the General has asked me to—er—invite you take part in some of our tournaments. We have tennis, you know, an’ golf, an’ croquet, an’ that sort of thing. Of course, you play tennis, an’ I rather fancy you’re a golfer as well. You look that kind of girl—Eh, what?”

He caressed a small mustache as he spoke, using the finger and thumb of each hand alternately, and Helen noticed that his hands were surprisingly large when compared with his otherwise fragile frame.

“Who is the General?” she inquired.

“Oh, Wragg, you know. He looks after everything in the amusement line, an’ I help. Do let me put you down for the singles an’ mixed doubles. None of the women here can play for nuts, an’ I haven’t got a partner yet for the doubles. I’ve been waitin’ for someone like you to turn up.”

“You have not remained long in suspense,” she could not help saying. “You are Mr. Vavasour, are you not?”

“Yes, better known as Georgie.”

“And you arrived in Maloja last evening, I think. Well, I do play tennis, or rather, I used to play fairly well some years ago——”

“By gad! just what I thought. Go slow in your practice games, Miss Wynton, an’ you’ll have a rippin’ handicap.”

“Would that be quite honest?” said Helen, lifting her steadfast brown eyes to meet his somewhat too free scrutiny.

“Honest? Rather! You wait till you see the old guard pullin’ out a bit when they settle down to real business. But the General is up to their little dodges. He knows their form like a book, an’ he gets every one of ’em shaken out by the first round—Eh, what?”

“The arrangement seems to be ideal if one is friendly with the General,” said Helen.

Vavasour drew up a chair. He also drew up the ends of his trousers, thus revealing that the Pomeranian brown and myrtle green stripes in his necktie were faithfully reproduced in his socks, while these master tints were thoughtfully developed in the subdominant hues of his clothes and boots.

“By Jove! what a stroke of luck I should have got hold of you first!” he chuckled. “I’m pretty good at the net, Miss Wynton. If we manage things properly, we ought to have the mixed doubles a gift with plus half forty, an’ in the ladies’ singles you’ll be a Queen’s Club champion at six-stone nine—Eh, what?”

Though Vavasour represented a species of inane young man whom Helen detested, she bore with him because she hungered for the sound of an English voice in friendly converse this bright morning. At times her life was lonely enough in London; but she had never felt her isolation there. The great city appealed to her in all its moods. Her cheerful yet sensitive nature did not shrink from contact with its hurrying crowds. The mere sense of aloofness among so many millions of people brought with it the knowledge that she was one of them, a human atom plunged into a heedless vortex the moment she passed from her house into the street.

Here in Maloja things were different. While her own identity was laid bare, while men and women canvassed her name, her appearance, her occupation, she was cut off from them by a social wall of their own contriving. The attitude of the younger women told her that trespassers were forbidden within that sacred fold. She knew now that she had done a daring thing—outraged one of the cheap conventions—in coming alone to this clique-ridden Swiss valley. Better a thousand times have sought lodgings in some small village inn, and mixed with the homely folk who journeyed thither on the diligence or tramped joyously afoot, than strive to win the sympathy of any of these shallow nonentities of the smart set.

Even while listening to “Georgie’s” efforts to win her smiles with slangy confidences, she saw that Mrs. Vavasour had halted in mid career, and joined a group of women, evidently a mother and two daughters, and that she herself was the subject of their talk. She wondered why. She was somewhat perplexed when the conclave broke up suddenly, the girls going to the door, Mrs. Vavasour retreating majestically to the far end of the veranda, and the other elderly woman drawing a short, fat, red faced man away from a discussion with another man.

“Jolly place, this,” Vavasour was saying. “There’s dancin’ most nights. The dowager brigade want the band to play classical music, an’ that sort of rot, you know; but Mrs. de la Vere and the Wragg girls like a hop, an’ we generally arrange things our own way. We’ll have a dance to-night if you wish it; but you must promise to——”

“Georgie,” cried the pompous little man, “I want you a minute!”

Vavasour swung round. Evidently he regarded the interruption as “a beastly bore.” “All right, General,” he said airily. “I’ll be there soon. No hurry, is there?”

“Yes, I want you now!” The order was emphatic. The General’s only military asset was a martinet voice, and he made the most of it.

“Rather rotten, isn’t it, interferin’ with a fellow in this way?” muttered Vavasour. “Will you excuse me? I must see what the old boy is worryin’ about. I shall come back soon—Eh, what?”

“I am going out,” said Helen; “but we shall meet again. I remain here a month.”

“You’ll enter for the tournament?” he asked over his shoulder.

“I—think so. It will be something to do.”

“Thanks awfully. And don’t forget to-night.”

Helen laughed. She could not help it. The younger members of the Wragg family were eying her sourly through the glass partition. They seemed to be nice girls too, and she made up her mind to disillusion them speedily if they thought that she harbored designs on the callow youth whom they probably regarded as their own special cavalier.

When she passed through the inner doorway to go to her room she noticed that the General was giving Georgie some instructions which were listened to in sulky silence. Indeed, that remarkable ex-warrior was laying down the law of the British parish with a clearness that was admirable. He had been young himself once,—dammit!—and had as keen an eye for a pretty face as any other fellow; but no gentleman could strike up an acquaintance with an unattached female under the very nose of his mother, not to mention the noses of other ladies who were his friends. Georgie broke out in protest.

“Oh, but I say, General, she is a lady, an’ you yourself said——”

“I know I did. I was wrong. Even a wary old bird like me can make a mistake. Mrs. Vavasour has just warned my wife about her. It’s no good arguing, Georgie, my boy. Nowadays you can’t draw the line too rigidly. Things permissible in Paris or Nice won’t pass muster here. I’m sorry, Georgie. She’s a high stepper and devilish taking, I admit. Writes for some ha’penny rag—er—for some cheap society paper, I hear. Why, dash it all, she will be lampooning us in it before we know where we are. Just you go and tell your mother you’ll behave better in future. Excellent woman, Mrs. Vavasour. She never makes a mistake. Gad! don’t you remember how she spotted that waiter from the Ritz who gulled the lot of us at the Jetée last winter? Took him for the French marquis he said he was, every one of us, women and all, till Mrs. V. fixed her eye on him and said, ‘Gustave!’ Damme! how he curled up!”

George was still obdurate. A masquerading waiter differed from Helen in many essentials. “He was a Frenchman, an’ they’re mostly rotters. This girl is English, General, an’ I shall look a proper sort of an ass if I freeze up suddenly after what I’ve said to her.”

“Not for the first time, my boy, and mebbe not for the last.” Then, in view of the younger man’s obvious defiance, the General’s white mustache bristled. “Of course, you can please yourself,” he growled: “but neither Mrs. Wragg nor my daughters will tolerate your acquaintance with that person!”

“Oh, all right, General,” came the irritated answer. “Between you an’ the mater I’ve got to come to heel; but it’s a beastly shame, I say, an’ you’re all makin’ a jolly big mistake.”

Georgie’s intelligence might be superficial; but he knew a lady when he met one, and Helen had attracted him powerfully. He was thanking his stars for the good fortune that numbered him among the earliest of her acquaintances in the hotel, and it was too bad that the barring edict should have been issued against her so unexpectedly. But he was not of a fighting breed, and he quailed before the threat of Mrs. Wragg’s displeasure.

Helen, after a delightful ramble past the château and along the picturesque turns and twists of the Colline des Artistes, returned in time for tea, which was served on the veranda, the common rendezvous of the hotel during daylight. No one spoke to her. She went out again, and walked by the lake till the shadows fell and the mountains glittered in purple and gold. She dressed herself in a simple white evening frock, dined in solitary state, and ventured into the ball room after dinner.

Georgie was dancing with Mrs. de la Vere, a languid looking woman who seemed to be pining for admiration. At the conclusion of the waltz that was going on when Helen entered, Vavasour brought his partner a whisky and soda and a cigarette. He passed Helen twice, but ignored her, and whirled one of the Wragg girls off into a polka. Again he failed to see her when parties were being formed for a quadrille. Even to herself she did not attempt to deny a feeling of annoyance, though she extracted a bitter amusement from the knowledge that she had been slighted by such a vapid creature.

She was under no misconception as to what had happened. The women were making a dead set against her. If she had been plain or dowdy, they might have been friendly enough. It was an unpardonable offense that she should be good looking, unchaperoned, and not one of the queerly assorted mixture they deemed their monde. For a few minutes she was really angry. She realized that her only crime was poverty. Given a little share of the wealth held by many of these passée matrons and bold-eyed girls, she would be a reigning star among them, and could act and talk as she liked. Yet her shyness and reserve would have been her best credentials to any society that was constituted on a sounder basis than a gathering of snobs. Among really well-born people she would certainly have been received on an equal footing until some valid reason for ostracism was forthcoming. The imported limpets on this Swiss rock of gentility were not sure of their own grip. Hence, they strenuously refused to make room for a newcomer until they were shoved aside.

Poor, disillusioned Helen! When she went to church she prayed to the good Lord to deliver her and everybody else from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. She felt now that there might well be added to the Litany a fresh petition which should include British communities on the Continent in the list of avoidable evils.

At that instant the piquant face and figure of Millicent Jaques rose before her mind’s eye. She pictured to herself the cool effrontery with which the actress would crush these waspish women by creating a court of every eligible man in the place. It was not a healthy thought, but it was the offspring of sheer vexation, and Helen experienced her second temptation that day when de la Vere, the irresistible “Reginald” of Mrs. Vavasour’s sketchy reminiscences, came and asked her to dance.

She recognized him at once. He sat with Mrs. de la Vere at table, and never spoke to her unless it was strictly necessary. He had distinguished manners, a pleasant voice, and a charming smile, and he seemed to be the devoted slave of every pretty woman in the hotel except his wife.

“Please pardon the informality,” he said, with an affability that cloaked the impertinence. “We are quite a family party at Maloja. I hear you are staying here some weeks, and we are bound to get to know each other sooner or later.”

Helen could dance well. She was so mortified by the injustice meted out to her that she almost accepted de la Vere’s partnership on the spur of the moment. But her soul rebelled against the man’s covert insolence, and she said quietly:

“No, thank you. I do not care to dance.”

“May I sit here and talk?” he persisted.

“I am just going,” she said, “and I think Mrs. de la Vere is looking for you.”

By happy chance the woman in question was standing alone in the center of the ball room, obviously in quest of some man who would take her to the foyer for a cigarette. Helen retreated with the honors of war; but the irresistible one only laughed.

“That idiot Georgie told the truth, then,” he admitted. “And she knows what the other women are saying. What cats these dear creatures can be, to be sure!”

Spencer happened to be an interested onlooker. Indeed, he was trying to arrive at the best means of obtaining an introduction to Helen when he saw de la Vere stroll leisurely up to her with the assured air of one sated by conquest. The girl brushed close to him as he stood in the passage. She held her head high and her eyes were sparkling. He had not heard what was said; but de la Vere’s discomfiture was so patent that even his wife smiled as she sailed out on the arm of a youthful purveyor of cigarettes.

Spencer longed for an opportunity to kick de la Vere; yet, in some sense, he shared that redoubtable lady-killer’s rebuff. He too was wondering if the social life of a Swiss hotel would permit him to seek a dance with Helen. Under existing conditions, it would provide quite a humorous episode, he told himself, to strike up a friendship with her. He could not imagine why she had adopted such an aloof attitude toward all and sundry; but it was quite evident that she declined anything in the guise of promiscuous acquaintance. And he, like her, felt lonely. There were several Americans in the hotel, and he would probably meet some of the men in the bar or smoking room after the dance was ended. But he would have preferred a pleasant chat with Helen that evening, and now she had gone to her room in a huff.

Then an inspiration came to him. “Guess I’ll stir up Mackenzie to send along an introduction,” he said. “A telegram will fix things.”

It was not quite so easy to explain matters in the curt language of the wire, he found, and it savored of absurdity to amaze the beer-drinking Scot with a long message. So he compromised between desire and expediency by a letter.

“Dear Mr. Mackenzie,” he wrote, “life is not rapid at this terminus. It might take on some new features if I had the privilege of saying ‘How de do’ to Miss Wynton. Will you oblige me by telling her that one of your best and newest friends happens to be in the same hotel as her charming self, and that if she gets him to sparkle, he (which is I) will help considerable with copy for ‘The Firefly.’ Advise me by same post, and the rest of the situation is up to yours faithfully,

“C. K. S.”

The letter was posted, and Spencer waited five tiresome days. He saw little or nothing of Helen save at meals. Once he met her on a footpath that runs through a wood by the side of the lake to the little hamlet of Isola, and he was minded to raise his hat, as he would have done to any other woman in the hotel whom he encountered under similar circumstances; but she deliberately looked away, and his intended courtesy must have passed unheeded.

As he sedulously avoided any semblance of dogging her footsteps, he could not know how she was being persecuted by de la Vere, Vavasour, and one or two other men of like habit. That knowledge was yet to come. Consequently he deemed her altogether too prudish, and was so out of patience with her that he and Stampa went off for a two days’ climb by way of the Muretto Pass to Chiareggio and back to Sils-Maria over the Fex glacier.

Footsore and tired, but thoroughly converted to the marvels of the high Alps, he reached the Kursaal side by side with the postman who brought the chief English mail about six o’clock each evening.

He waited with an eager crowd of residents while the hall porter sorted the letters. There were some for him from America, and one from London in a handwriting that was strange to him. But he had quick eyes, and he saw that a letter addressed to Miss Helen Wynton, in the flamboyant envelope of “The Firefly,” bore the same script.

Mackenzie had risen to the occasion. He even indulged in a classical joke. “There is something in the name of Helen that attracts,” he said. “Were it not for the lady whose face drew a thousand ships to Ilium, we should never have heard of Paris, or Troy, or the heel of Achilles, and all these would be greatly missed.”

“And I should never have heard of Mackenzie or Maloja,” thought Spencer, sinking into a chair and looking about to learn whether or not the girl would find her letter before he went to dress for dinner. He was sure she knew his name. Perhaps when she read the editor’s note, she too would search the spacious lounge with those fine eyes of hers for the man described therein. If that were so, he meant to go to her instantly, discuss the strangeness of the coincidence that led to two of Mackenzie’s friends being at the hotel at the same time, and suggest that they should dine together.

The project seemed feasible, and it was decidedly pleasant in perspective. He longed to compare notes with her,—to tell her the quaint stories of the hills related to him by Stampa in a medley of English, French, Italian, and German; perhaps to plan delightful trips to the fairyland in company.

People began to clear away from the hall porter’s table; yet Helen remained invisible. He could hardly have missed her; but to make certain he rose and glanced at the few remaining letters. Yes, “The Firefly’s” gaudy imprint still gleamed at him. He turned way, disappointed. After his long tramp and a night in a weird Italian inn, a bath was imperative, and the boom of the dressing gong was imminent.

He was crossing the hall toward the elevator when he heard her voice.

“I am so glad you are keen on an early climb,” she was saying, with a new note of confidence that stirred him strangely. “I have been longing to leave the sign boards and footpaths far behind, but I felt rather afraid of going to the Forno for the first time with a guide. You see, I know nothing about mountaineering, and you can put me up to all the dodges beforehand.”

“Show you the ropes, in fact,” agreed the man with her, Mark Bower.

Spencer was so completely taken by surprise that he could only stare at the two as though they were ghosts. They had entered the hotel together, and had apparently been out for a walk. Helen picked up her letter and held it carelessly in her hand while she continued to talk with Bower. Her pleasurable excitement was undeniable. She regarded her companion as a friend, and was evidently overjoyed at his presence. Spencer banged into the elevator, astonished the attendant and two other occupants by the savagery of his command, “Au deuxième, vite!” and paced through a long corridor with noisy clatter of hob-nailed boots.

He was in a rare fret and fume when he sat down to dinner alone. Bower was at Helen’s table. It was brightened by rare flowers not often seen in sterile Maloja. A bottle of champagne rested in an ice bucket by his side. He had brought with him the atmosphere of London, of the pleasant life that London offers to those who can buy her favors. Truly this Helen, all unconsciously, had not only found the heel of a modern Achilles, but was wounding him sorely. For now Spencer knew that he wanted to see her frank eyes smiling into his as they were smiling into Bower’s, and, no matter what turn events took, a sinister element had been thrust into a harmless idyl by this man’s arrival.

CHAPTER VII

SOME SKIRMISHING

Later, the American saw the two sitting in the hall. They were chatting with the freedom of old friends. Helen’s animated face showed that the subject of their talk was deeply interesting. She was telling Bower of the slights inflicted on her by the other women; but Spencer interpreted her intent manner as supplying sufficient proof of a stronger emotion than mere friendliness. He was beginning to detest Bower.

It was his habit to decide quickly when two ways opened before him. He soon settled his course now. To remain in the hotel under present conditions involved a loss of self respect, he thought. He went to the bureau, asked for his account, and ordered a carriage to St. Moritz for the morrow’s fast train to England.

The manager was politely regretful. “You are leaving us at the wrong time, sir,” he said. “Within the next few days we ought to have a midsummer storm, when even the lower hills will be covered with snow. Then, we usually enjoy a long spell of magnificent weather.”

“Sorry,” said Spencer. “I like the scramble up there,” and he nodded in the direction of the Bernina range, “and old Stampa is a gem of a guide; but I can hardly put off any longer some business that needs attention in England. Anyhow, I shall come back, perhaps next month. Stampa says it is all right here in September.”

“Our best month, I assure you, and the ideal time to drop down into Italy when you are tired of the mountains.”

“I must let it go at that. I intend to fix Stampa so that he can remain here till the end of the season. So you see I mean to return.”

“He was very fortunate in meeting you, Mr. Spencer,” said the manager warmly.

“Well, it is time he had a slice of luck. I’ve taken a fancy to the old fellow. One night, in the Forno hut, he told me something of his story. I guess it will please him to stop at the Maloja for awhile.”

“He told you about his daughter?” came the tentative question.

“Not all. I am afraid there was no difficulty in filling in the blanks. I heard enough to make me respect him and sympathize with his troubles.”

The manager shook his head, with the air of one who recalls that which he would willingly have forgotten. “Such incidents are rare in Switzerland,” he said. “I well remember the sensation her death created. She was such a pretty girl. The young men at Pontresina called her ‘The Edelweiss’ because she was so inaccessible. In fact, poor Stampa had educated her beyond her station, and that is not always good for a woman, especially in these quiet valleys, where knowledge of cattle and garden produce is a better asset than speaking French and playing the piano.”

Spencer agreed. He could name other districts where the same rule held good. He stood for a moment in the spacious hall to light a cigar. Involuntarily he glanced at Helen. She met his gaze, and said something to Bower that caused the latter also to turn and look.

“She has read Mackenzie’s letter,” thought Spencer, taking refuge behind a cloud of smoke. “It will be bad behavior on my part to leave the hotel without making my bow. Shall I go to her now, or wait till morning?”

He reflected that Helen might be out early next day. If he presented his introduction at once, she would probably ask him to sit with her a little while, and then he must become acquainted with Bower. He disliked the notion; but he saw no way out of it, unless indeed Helen treated him with the chilling abruptness she meted out to other men in the hotel who tried to become friendly with her. He was weighing the pros and cons dispassionately, when the English chaplain approached.

“Do you play bridge, Mr. Spencer?” he asked.

“I know the leads, and call ‘without’ on the least provocation,” was the reply.

“You are the very man I am searching for, and I have the authority of the First Book of Samuel in my quest.”

“Well, now, that is the last place in which I should expect to find my bridge portrait.”

“Don’t you remember how Saul’s servants asked his permission to ‘seek out a man who is a cunning player’? That is exactly what I am doing. Come to the smoking room. There are two other men there, and one is a fellow countryman of yours.”

The Rev. Mr. Hare was a genial soul, a Somersetshire vicar who took his annual holiday by accepting a temporary position in some Alpine village where there was an English church. He did not dream that he was acting the part of Hermes, messenger of the gods, at that moment, for indeed his appearance on the scene just then changed the whole trend of Spencer’s actions.

“What a delightful place this is!” he went on as they walked together through a long corridor. “But what is the matter with the people? They don’t mix. I would not have believed that there were so many prigs in the British Isles.”

Some such candid opinion had occurred to Spencer; but, being an American, he thought that perhaps he might be mistaken. “The English character is somewhat adaptable to environment, I have heard. That is why you send out such excellent colonists,” he said.

“Doesn’t that go rather to prove that everybody here should be hail fellow well met?”

“Not at all. They take their pose from the Alps,—snow, glaciers, hard rock, you know,—that is the subtlety of it.”

The vicar laughed. “You have given me a new point of view,” he said. “Some of them are slippery customers too. Yes, one might carry the parallel a long way. But here we are. Now, mind you cut me as a partner. I have tried the others, and found them severely critical—as bridge players. You look a stoic.”

The vicar had his wish. Spencer and he opposed a man from Pittsburg, named Holt, and Dunston, an Englishman.

While the latter was shuffling the cards for Hare’s deal he said something that took one, at least, of his hearers by surprise. “Bower has turned up, I see. What has brought him to the Engadine at this time of year I can’t guess, unless perhaps he is interested in a pretty face.”

“At this time of the year,” repeated Spencer. “Isn’t this the season?”

“Not for him. He used to be a famous climber; but he has given it up since he waxed fat and prosperous. I have met him once or twice at St. Moritz in the winter. Otherwise, he usually shows up in the fashionable resorts in August,—Ostend, or Trouville, or, if he is livery, Vichy or Aix-les-Bains,—anywhere but this quiet spot. Bower likes excitement too. He often opens a thousand pound bank at baccarat, whereas people are shocked in Maloja at seeing Hare play bridge at tenpence a hundred.”

“I leave it, partner,” broke in the vicar, to whom the game was the thing.

“No trumps,” said Spencer, without giving the least heed to his cards. It was true his eyes were resting on the ace, king, and queen of spades; but his mind was tortured by the belief that by his fantastic conceit in sending Helen to this Alpine fastness he had delivered her bound to the vultures.

“Double no trumps,” said Dunston, gloating over the possession of a long suit of hearts and three aces. Hare looked anxious, and Spencer suddenly awoke to the situation.

“Satisfied,” he said.

Holt led the three of hearts, and Spencer spread his cards on the table with the gravity of a Sioux chief. In addition to the three high spades he held six others.

“Really!” gasped the parson, “a most remarkable declaration!”

Yet there was an agitated triumph in his voice that was not pleasant hearing for Dunston, who took the trick with the ace of hearts and led the lowest of a sequence to the queen.

“Got him!” panted Hare, producing the king.

The rest was easy. The vicar played a small spade and scored ninety-six points without any further risk.

“It is magnificent; but it is not bridge,” said the man from Pittsburg. Dunston simply glowered.

“Partner,” demanded Hare timidly, “may I ask why you called ‘no trumps’ on a hand like that?”

“Thought I would give you a chance of distinguishing yourself,” replied Spencer. “Besides, that sort of thing rattles your opponents at the beginning of a game. Keep your nerve now, padre, and you have ’em in a cleft stick.”

As it happened, Holt made a “no trump” declaration on a very strong hand; but Spencer held seven clubs headed by the ace and king.

He doubled. Holt redoubled. Spencer doubled again.

Hare flushed somewhat. “Allow me to say that I am very fond of bridge; but I cannot take part in a game that savors of gambling, even for low stakes,” he broke in.

“Shall we let her go at forty-eight points a trick?” Spencer asked.

“Yep!” snapped Holt. “Got all the clubs?”

“Not all—sufficient, perhaps.”

He played the ace. Dunston laid the queen and knave on the table. Spencer scored the winning trick before his adversary obtained an opening.

“You have a backbone of cast steel,” commented Dunston, who was an iron-master. “Do you play baccarat?” he went on, with curious eagerness.

“I regret to state that my education was completed in a Western mining camp.”

“Will you excuse the liberty, and perhaps Mr. Hare won’t listen for a moment?—but I will finance you in three banks of a thousand each, either banking or punting, if you promise to take on Bower. I can arrange it easily. I say this because you personally may not care to play for high sums.”

The suggestion was astounding, coming as it did from a stranger; but Spencer merely said:

“You don’t like Bower, then?”

“That is so. I have business relations with him occasionally, and there he is all that could be wished. But I have seen him clean out more than one youngster ruthlessly,—force the play to too high stakes, I mean. I think you could take his measure. Anyhow, I am prepared to back you.”

“I’m leaving here to-morrow.”

“Ah, well, we may have another opportunity. If so, my offer holds.”

“Guess you haven’t heard that Spencer is the man who bored a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains?” said Holt.

“No. You must tell me about it. Sorry, Mr. Hare, I am stopping the game.”

Spencer continued to have amazing good fortune, and he played with skill, but without any more fireworks. At the close of the sitting the vicar said cheerfully:

“You are not a ladies’ man, Mr. Spencer. You know the old proverb,—lucky at cards, unlucky in love? But let me hope that it does not apply in your case.”

“Talking about a ladies’ man, who is the girl your friend Bower dined with?” asked Holt. “She has been in the hotel several days; but she didn’t seem to be acquainted with anybody in particular until he blew in this afternoon.”

“She is a Miss Helen Wynton,” said the vicar. “I like her very much from what little I have seen of her. She attended both services on Sunday, and I happen to be aware of the fact that she was at mass in the Roman church earlier. I wanted her to play the harmonium next Sunday; but she declined, and gave me her reasons too.”

“May I ask what they were?” inquired Spencer.

“Well, speaking in confidence, they were grievously true. Some miserable pandering to Mrs. Grundy has set the other women against her; so she declined to thrust herself into prominence. I tried to talk her out of it, but failed.”

“Who is Mrs. Grundy, anyhow?” growled Holt.

The others laughed.

“She is the Medusa of modern life,” explained the vicar. “She turns to stone those who gaze on her. Most certainly she petrifies all good feeling and Christian tolerance. Why, I actually heard a woman whose conduct is not usually governed by what I hold to be good taste sneer at Miss Wynton this evening. ‘The murder is out now,’ she said. ‘Bower’s presence explains everything.’ Yet I am able to state that Miss Wynton was quite unprepared for his arrival. By chance I was standing on the steps when he drove up to the hotel, and it was perfectly clear from the words they used that neither was aware that the other was in Maloja.”

Spencer leaned over toward the iron-master. “Tell you what,” he said; “I’ve changed my mind about the trip to England to-morrow. Get up that game with Bower. I’ll stand the racket myself unless you want to go half shares.”

“Done! I should like to have an interest in it. Not that I am pining for Bower’s money, and it may be that he will win ours; but I am keen on giving him a sharp run. At Nice last January not a soul in the Casino would go Banco when he opened a big bank. They were afraid of him.”

While he was speaking, Dunston’s shrewd eyes dwelt on the younger man’s unmoved face. He wondered what had caused this sudden veering of purpose. It was certainly not the allurement of heavy gambling, for Spencer had declined the proposal as coolly as he now accepted it. Being a man of the world, he thought he could peer beneath the mask. To satisfy himself, he harked back to the personal topic.

“By the way, does anyone know who Miss Wynton is?” he said. “That inveterate gossip, Mrs. Vavasour, who can vouch for every name in the Red Book, says she is a lady journalist.”

“That, at any rate, is correct,” said the vicar. “In fact, Miss Wynton herself told me so.”

“Jolly fine girl, whatever she is. To give Bower his due, he has always been a person of taste.”

“I have reason to believe,” said Spencer, “that Miss Wynton’s acquaintance with Mr. Bower is of the slightest.”

His words were slow and clear. Dunston, sure now that his guess was fairly accurate, hastened to efface an unpleasant impression.

“Of course, I only meant that if Bower is seen talking to any woman, it may be taken for granted that she is a pretty one,” he explained. “But who’s for a drink? Perhaps we shall meet our expected opponent in the bar, Mr. Spencer.”

“I have some letters to write. Fix that game for to-morrow or next day, and I’ll be on hand.”

Dunston and Holt paid the few shillings they owed, and went out.

Hare did not move. He looked anxious, almost annoyed. “It is exceedingly ridiculous how circumstances pass beyond a man’s control occasionally,” he protested. “Am I right in assuming that until this evening neither Bower nor Dunston was known to you, Mr. Spencer?”

“Absolutely correct, vicar. I have never yet spoken to Bower, and you heard all that passed between Dunston and myself.”

“Then my harmless invitation to you to join in a game at cards has led directly to an arrangement for play at absurdly high figures?”

“It seems to me, Mr. Hare, that Bower’s tracks and mine are destined to cross in more ways than one in the near future,” said Spencer coolly.

But the vicar was not to be switched away from the new thought that was troubling him. “I will not ask what you mean,” he said, gazing steadfastly at the American. “My chief concern is the outcome of my share in this evening’s pleasant amusement. I cannot shut my ears to the fact that you have planned the loss or gain of some thousands of pounds on the turn of a card at baccarat.”

“If it is disagreeable to you——”

“How can it be otherwise? I am a broad-minded man, and I see no harm whatever in playing bridge for pennies; but I am more pained than I care to confess at the prospect of such a sequel to our friendly meeting to-night. If this thing happens,—if a small fortune is won or lost merely to gratify Dunston’s whim,—I assure you that I shall never touch a card again as long as I live.”

Then Spencer laughed. “That would be too bad, Mr. Hare,” he cried. “Make your mind easy. The game is off. Count on me for the tenpence a hundred limit after dinner to-morrow.”

“Now, that is quite good and kind of you. Dunston made me very miserable by his mad proposition. Of course, both he and Bower are rich men, men to whom a few thousand pounds are of little importance; or, to be accurate, they profess not to care whether they win or lose, though their wealth is not squandered so heedlessly when it is wanted for some really deserving object. But perhaps that is uncharitable. My only wish is to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous promise.”

“Is Bower so very rich then? Have you met him before?”

“He is a reputed millionaire. I read of him in the newspapers at times. In my small country parish such financial luminaries twinkle from a far sky. It is true he is a recent light. He made a great deal of money in copper, I believe.”

“What kind of character do you give him,—good, bad, or indifferent?”

Hare’s benevolent features showed the astonishment that thrilled him at this blunt question. “I hardly know what to say——” he stammered.

Spencer liked this cheery vicar and resolved to trust him. “Let me explain,” he said. “You and I agree in thinking that Miss Wynton is an uncommonly nice girl. I am not on her visiting list at present, so my judgment is altruistic. Suppose she was your daughter or niece, would you care to see her left to that man’s mercies?”

The clergyman fidgeted a little before he answered. Spencer was a stranger to him, yet he felt drawn toward him. The strong, clear cut face won confidence. “If it was the will of Heaven, I would sooner see her in the grave,” he said, with solemn candor.

Spencer rose. He held out his hand. “I guess it’s growing late,” he cried, “and our talk has swung round to a serious point. Sleep well, Mr. Hare. That game is dead off.”

As he passed the bar he heard Bower’s smooth, well rounded accents through the half-open door. “Nothing I should like better,” he was saying. “Are you tired? If not, bring your friend to my rooms now. Although I have been in the train all night, I am fit as a fiddle.”

“Let me see. I left him in the smoking room with our padre——”

It was Dunston who spoke; but Bower broke in:

“Oh, keep the clergy out of it! They make such a song about these things if they hear of them.”

“I was going to say that if he is not there he will be in his room. He is two doors from me, No. 61, I think. Shall I fetch him?”

“Do, by all means. By Jove! I didn’t expect to get any decent play here!”

Spencer slipped into a small vestibule where he had left a hat and overcoat. He remained there till Dunston crossed the hall and entered the elevator. Then he went out, meaning to stroll and smoke in the moonlight for an hour. It would be easier to back out of the promised game in the morning than at that moment. Moreover, in the clear, still air he could plan a course of action, the need of which was becoming insistent.

He was blessed, or cursed, with a stubborn will, and he knew it. Hitherto, it had been exercised on a theory wrapped in hard granite, and the granite had yielded, justifying the theory. Now he was brought face to face with a woman’s temperament, and his experience of that elusive and complex mixture of attributes was of the slightest. Attractive young women in Colorado are plentiful as cranberries; but never one of them had withdrawn his mind’s eye from his work. Why, then, was he so ready now to devote his energies to the safeguarding of Helen Wynton? It was absurd to pretend that he was responsible for her future well-being because of the whim that sent her on a holiday. She was well able to take care of herself. She had earned her own living before he met her; she had risen imperiously above the petty malice displayed by some of the residents in the hotel; there was a reasonable probability that she might become the wife of a man highly placed and wealthy. Every consideration told in favor of a policy of non-interference. The smoking of an inch of good cigar placed the matter in such a convincing light that Spencer was half resolved to abide by his earlier decision and leave Maloja next morning.

But the other half, made up of inclination, pleaded against all the urging of expediency. He deemed the vicar an honest man, and that stout-hearted phrase of his stuck. Yet, whether he went or stayed, the ultimate solution of the problem lay with Helen herself. Once on speaking terms with her, he could form a more decided view. It was wonderful how one’s estimate of a man or woman could be modified in the course of a few minutes’ conversation. Well, he would settle things that way, and meanwhile enjoy the beauty of a wondrous night.

A full moon was flooding the landscape with a brilliance not surpassed in the crystal atmosphere of Denver. The snow capped summit of the Cima di Rosso was fit to be a peak in Olympus, a silver throned height where the gods sat in council. The brooding pines perched on the hillside beyond the Orlegna looked like a company of gigantic birds with folded wings. From the road leading to the village he could hear the torrent itself singing its mad song of freedom after escaping from the icy caverns of the Forno glacier. Quite near, on the right, the tiny cascade that marks the first seaward flight of the Inn mingled its sweet melody with the orchestral thunder of the more distant cataracts plunging down the precipices toward Italy. It was a night when one might listen to the music of the spheres, and Spencer was suddenly jarred into unpleasant consciousness of his surroundings by the raucous voices of some peasants bawling a Romansch ballad in a wayside wine house.

Turning sharply on his heel, he took the road by the lake. There at least he would find peace from the strenuous amours of Margharita as trolled by the revelers. He had not gone three hundred yards before he saw a woman standing near the low wall that guarded the embanked highway from the water. She was looking at the dark mirror of the lake, and seemed to be identifying the stars reflected in it. Three or four times, as he approached, she tilted her head back and gazed at the sky. The skirt of a white dress was visible below a heavy ulster; a knitted shawl was wrapped loosely over her hair and neck, and the ends were draped deftly across her shoulders; but before she turned to see who was coming along the road Spencer had recognized her. Thus, in a sense, he was a trifle the more prepared of the two for this unforeseen meeting, and he hailed it as supplying the answer to his doubts.

“Now,” said he to himself, “I shall know in ten seconds whether or not I travel west by north to-morrow.”

Helen did not avert her glance instantly. Nor did she at once resume a stroll evidently interrupted to take in deep breaths of the beauty of the scene. That was encouraging to the American,—she expected him to speak to her.

He halted in the middle of the road. If he was mistaken, he did not wish to alarm her. “If you will pardon the somewhat unorthodox time and place, I should like to make myself known to you, Miss Wynton,” he said, lifting his cap.

“You are Mr. Spencer?” she answered, with a frank smile.

“Yes, I have a letter of introduction from Mr. Mackenzie.”

“So have I. What do we do next? Exchange letters? Mine is in the hotel.”

“Suppose we just shake?”

“Well, that is certainly the most direct way.”

Their hands met. They were both aware of a whiff of nervousness. For some reason, the commonplace greetings of politeness fell awkwardly from their lips. In such a predicament a woman may always be trusted to find the way out.

“It is rather absurd that we should be saying how pleased we are that Mr. Mackenzie thought of writing those letters, while in reality I am horribly conscious that I ought not to be here at all, and you are probably thinking that I am quite an amazing person,” and Helen laughed light heartedly.

“That is part of my thought,” said Spencer.

“Won’t you tell me the remainder?”

“May I?”

“Please do. I am in chastened mood.”

“I wish I was skilled in the trick of words, then I might say something real cute. As it is, I can only supply a sort of condensed statement,—something about a nymph, a moonlit lake, the spirit of the glen,—nice catchy phrases every one,—with a line thrown in from Shelley about an ‘orbéd maiden with white fire laden.’ Let me go back a hundred yards, Miss Wynton, and I shall return with the whole thing in order.”

“With such material I believe you would bring me a sonnet.”

“No. I hail from the wild and woolly West, where life itself is a poem; so I stick to prose. There is a queer sort of kink in human nature to account for that.”

“On the principle that a Londoner never hears the roar of London, I suppose?”

“Exactly. An old lady I know once came across a remarkable instance of it. She watched a ship-wreck, the real article, with all the scenic accessories, and when a half drowned sailor was dragged ashore she asked him how he felt at that awful moment. And what do you think he said?”

“Very wet,” laughed Helen.

“No, that is the other story. This man said he was very dry.”

“Ah, the one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, which reminds me that if I remain here much longer talking nonsense I shall lose the good opinion I am sure you have formed of me from Mr. Mackenzie’s letter. Why, it must be after eleven o’clock! Are you going any farther, or will you walk with me to the hotel?”

“If you will allow me——”

“Indeed, I shall be very glad of your company. I came out to escape my own thoughts. Did you ever meet such an unsociable lot of people as our fellow boarders, Mr. Spencer? If it was not for my work, and the fact that I have taken my room for a month, I should hie me forthwith to the beaten track of the vulgar but good natured tourist.”

“Why not go? Let me help you to-morrow to map out a tour. Then I shall know precisely where to waylay you, for I feel the chill here too.”

“I wish I could fall in with the first part of your proposal, though the second rather suggests that you regard Mr. Mackenzie’s letter of introduction as a letter of marque.”

“At any rate, I am an avowed pirate,” he could not help retorting. “But to keep strictly to business, why not quit if you feel like wandering?”

“Because I was sent here, on a journalistic mission which I understand less now than when I received it in London. Of course, I am delighted with the place. It is the people I—kick at? Is that a quite proper Americanism?”

“It seems to fit the present case like a glove, or may I say, like a shoe?”

“Now you are laughing at me, inwardly of course, and I agree with you. Ladies should not use slang, nor should they promenade alone in Swiss valleys by moonlight. My excuse is that I did not feel sleepy, and the moon tempted me. Good night.”

They were yet some little distance from the hotel, and Spencer was at a loss to account for this sudden dismissal. She saw the look of bewilderment in his face.

“I have found a back stairs door,” she explained, with a smile. “I really don’t think I should have dared to come out at half-past ten if I had to pass the Gorgons in the foyer.”

She flitted away by a side path, leaving Spencer more convinced than ever that he had blundered egregiously in dragging this sedate and charming girl from the quiet round of existence in London to the artificial life of the Kursaal. Some feeling of unrest had driven her forth to commune with the stars. Was she asking herself why she was denied the luxuries showered on the doll-like creatures whose malicious tongues were busy the instant Bower set foot in the hotel? It would be an ill outcome of his innocent subterfuge if she returned to England discontented and rebellious. She was in “chastened mood,” she had said. He wondered why? Had Bower been too confident,—too sure of his prey to guard his tongue? Of all the unlooked for developments that could possibly be bound up with the harmless piece of midsummer madness that sent Helen Wynton to Switzerland, surely this roué’s presence was the most irritating and perplexing.

Then from the road came another stanza from the wine bibbers, now homeward bound. They were still howling about Margharita in long sustained cadences. And Spencer knew his Faust. It was to the moon that the lovesick maiden confided her dreams, and Mephisto was at hand to jog the elbow of his bewitched philosopher at exactly the right moment.

Spencer threw his cigar into the gurgling rivulet of the Inn. He condemned Switzerland, and the Upper Engadine, and the very great majority of the guests in the Kursaal, in one emphatic malediction, and went to his room, hoping to sleep, but actually to lie awake for hours and puzzle his brains in vain effort to evolve a satisfying sequel to the queer combination of events he had set in motion when he ran bare headed into the Strand after Bower’s motor car.

CHAPTER VIII

SHADOWS

“

It is a glorious morning. If the weather holds, your first visit to the real Alps should be memorable,” said Bower.

Helen had just descended the long flight of steps in front of the hotel. A tender purple light filled the valley. The nearer hills were silhouetted boldly against a sky of primrose and pink; but the misty depths where the lake lurked beneath the pines had not yet yielded wholly to the triumph of the new day. The air had a cold life in it that invigorated while it chilled. It resembled some vin frappé of rare vintage. Its fragrant vivacity was ready to burst forth at the first encouraging hint of a kindlier temperature.

“Why that dubious clause as to the weather?” asked Helen, looking at the golden shafts of sunlight on the topmost crags of Corvatsch and the Piz della Margna. Those far off summits were so startlingly vivid in outline that they seemed to be more accessible than the mist shrouded ravines cleaving their dun sides. It needed an effort of the imagination to correct the erring testimony of the eye.

“The moods of the hills are variable, my lady,—femininely fickle, in fact. There is a proverb that contrasts the wind with woman’s mind; but the disillusioned male who framed it evidently possessed little knowledge of weather changes in the high Alps, or else he——”

“Did you beguile me out of my cozy room at six o’clock on a frosty morning to regale me with stale jibes at my sex?”

“Perish the thought, Miss Wynton! My only intent was to explain that the ancient proverb maker, meaning to be rude, might have found a better simile.”

“Meanwhile, I am so cold that the only mood left in my composition is one of impatience to be moving.”

“Well, I am ready.”

“But where is our guide?”

“He has gone on in front with the porter.”

“Porter! What is the man carrying?”

“The wherewithal to refresh ourselves when we reach the hut.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “I had no idea that mountaineering was such a business. I thought the essentials were a packet of sandwiches and a flask.”

“You will please not be flippant. Climbing is serious work. And you must moderate your pace. If you walk at that rate from here to Forno, you will be very, very ill before you reach the hut.”

“Ill! How absurd!”

“Not only absurd but disagreeable,—far worse than crossing the Channel. Even old hands like me are not free from mountain sickness, though it seizes us at higher altitudes than we shall reach to-day. In the case of a novice, anything in the nature of hurrying during the outward journey is an unfailing factor.”

They were crossing the golf links, and the smooth path was tempting to a good walker. Helen smiled as she accommodated herself to Bower’s slower stride. Though the man might possess experience, the woman had the advantage of youth, the unattainable, and this wonderful hour after dawn was stirring its ichor in her veins.

“I suppose that is what Stampa meant when he took ‘Slow and Sure’ for his motto,” she said.

“Stampa! Who is Stampa?”

There was a sudden rasp of iron in his voice. As a rule Bower spoke with a cultivated languor that almost veiled the staccato accents of the man of affairs. Helen was so surprised by this unwarranted clang of anger that she looked at him with wide open eyes.

“He is the driver I told you of, the man who took the wheel off my carriage during the journey from St. Moritz,” she explained.

“Oh, of course. How stupid of me to forget! But, by the way, did you mention his name?”

“No, I think not. Someone interrupted me. Mr. Dunston came and spoke to you——”

He laughed gayly and drew in deep breaths of the keen air. He was carrying his ice ax over his left shoulder. With his right hand he brushed away a disturbing thought. “By Jove! yes! Dunston dragged me off to open a bank at baccarat, and you will be glad to hear that I won five hundred pounds.”

“I am glad you won; but who lost so much money?”

“Dunston dropped the greater part of it. Your American friend, Mr. Spencer, was rather inclined to brag of his prowess in that direction, it appears. He even went so far as to announce his willingness to play for four figures; but he backed out of it.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Spencer wanted to stake a thousand pounds on a single game at cards?”

“Evidently he did not want to do it, but he talked about it.”

“Yet he impressed me as being a very clear-headed and sensible young man,” said Helen decisively.

“Here, young lady, I must call you to account! In what category do you place me, then?”

“Oh, you are different. I disapprove of anyone playing for such high stakes; but I suppose you are used to it and can afford it, whereas a man who has his way to make in the world would be exceedingly foolish to do such a thing.”

“Pray, how did you come to measure the extent of Spencer’s finances?”

“Dear me! Did I say that?”

“I am sorry. Of course, I had no wish to speak offensively. What I mean is that he may be quite as well able to run a big bank at baccarat as I am.”

“He was telling me yesterday of his early struggles to gain a footing in some mining community in Colorado, and the impression his words left on me was that he is still far from wealthy; that is, as one understands the term. Here we are at the footpath. Shall we follow it and scramble up out of the ravine, or do you prefer the carriage road?”

“The footpath, please. But before we drop the subject of cards, which is unquestionably out of place on a morning like this, let me say that perhaps I have done the American an injustice. Dunston is given to exaggeration. He has so little control over his face that it is rank robbery to bet with him. Such a man is apt to run to extremes. It may be that Spencer was only talking through his hat, as they say in New York.”

Helen had the best of reasons for rejecting this version of the story. Her perceptive faculties, always well developed, were strung to high tension in Maloja. The social pinpricks inflicted there had rendered her more alert, more cautious, than was her wont. She was quite sure, for instance, judging from a number of slight indications, that Spencer was deliberately avoiding any opportunity of making Bower’s acquaintance. More than once, when an introduction seemed to be imminent, the American effaced himself. Other men in the hotel were not like that—they rather sought the great man’s company. She wondered if Bower had noticed it. Despite his candid, almost generous, disclaimer of motive, there was an undercurrent of hostility in his words that suggested a feeling of pique. She climbed the rocky path in silence until Bower spoke again.

“How do the boots go?” he asked.

“Splendidly, thanks. It was exceedingly kind of you to take such trouble about them. I had no idea one had to wear such heavy nails, and that tip of yours about the extra stockings is excellent.”

“You will acknowledge the benefit most during the descent. I have known people become absolutely lame on the home journey through wearing boots only just large enough for ordinary walking. As for the clamping of the nails over the edges of the soles, the sharp stones render that imperative. When you have crossed a moraine or two, and a peculiarly nasty geröll that exists beyond the hut, if we have time to make an easy ascent, you will understand the need of extra strong footwear.”

Helen favored him with a shy smile. “Long hours of reading have revealed the nature of a moraine,” she said; “but, please, what is a geröll?”

“A slope of loose stones. Let me see, what do they call it in Scotland and Cumberland? Ah, yes, a scree. On the French side of the Alps the same thing is known as a casse.”

“How well you know this country and its ways! Have you climbed many of the well known peaks?”

“Some years ago I scored my century beyond twelve thousand feet. That is pretty fair for an amateur.”

“Have you done the Matterhorn?”

“Yes, four times. Once I followed Tyndall’s example, and converted the summit into a pass between Switzerland and Italy.”

“How delightful! I suppose you have met many of the famous guides?”

He laughed pleasantly. “One does not attempt the Cervin or the Jungfrau without the best men, and in my time there were not twenty, all told. I had a long talk with our present guide last night, and found I had used many a track he had only seen from the valley.”

“Then——”

A loud toot on a cowhorn close at hand interrupted her. The artist was a small boy. He appeared to be waiting expectantly on a hillock for someone who came not.

“Is that a signal?” she asked.

“Yes. He is a gaumer, or cowherd,—another word for your Alpine vocabulary,—the burgher whose cattle he will drive to the pasture has probably arranged to meet him here.”

Bower was always an interesting and well informed companion. Launched now into a congenial topic, he gave Helen a thoroughly entertaining lecture on the customs of a Swiss commune. He pointed out the successive tiers of pastures, told her their names and seasons of use, and even hummed some verses of the cow songs, or Kuh-reihen, which the men sing to the cattle, addressing each animal by name.

An hour passed pleasantly in this manner. Their guide, a man named Josef Barth, and the porter, who answered to “Karl,” awaited them at the milk chalet by the side of Lake Cavloccio. Bower, evidently accustomed to the leadership of expeditions of this sort, tested their ice axes and examined the ropes slung to Barth’s rucksack.

“The Forno is a glacier de luxe,” he explained to Helen; “but it is always advisable to make sure that your appliances are in good order. That pickel you are carrying was made by the best blacksmith in Grindelwald, and you can depend on its soundness; but these men are so familiar with their surroundings that they often provide themselves with frayed ropes and damaged axes.”

“In addition to my boots, therefore, I am indebted to you for a special brand of ice ax,” she cried.

“Your gratitude now is as nothing to the ecstasy you will display when Karl unpacks his load,” he answered lightly. “Now, Miss Wynton, en route! You know the path to the glacier already, don’t you?”

“I have been to its foot twice.”

“Then you go in front. There is no room to walk two abreast. Before we tackle the ice we will call a halt for refreshments.”

From that point till the glacier was reached the climb was laboriously simple. There was no difficulty and not the slightest risk, even for a child; but the heavy gradient and the rarefied air made it almost impossible to sustain a conversation unless the speakers dawdled. Helen often found herself many yards in advance of the others. She simply could not help breasting the steeper portions of the track. She was drawn forward by an intense eagerness to begin the real business of the day. Bower did not seek to restrain her. He thought her high spirits admirable, and his gaze dwelt appreciatively on her graceful poise as she stopped on the crest of some small ravine and looked back at the plodders beneath. Attractive at all times, she was bewitching that morning to a man who prided himself on his athletic tastes. She wore a white knitted jersey and a short skirt, a costume seemingly devised to reveal the lines of a slender waist and supple limbs. A white Tam o’ Shanter was tied firmly over her glossy brown hair with a silk motor veil, and the stout boots which she had surveyed so ruefully when Bower brought them to her on the previous evening after interviewing the village shoemaker, were by no means so cumbrous in use as her unaccustomed eyes had deemed them. Even the phlegmatic guide was stirred to gruff appreciation when he saw her vault on to a large flat boulder in order to examine an iron cross that surmounted it.

“Ach, Gott!” he grunted, “that Englishwoman is as surefooted as a chamois.”

But Helen had found a name and a date on a triangular strip of metal attached to the cross. “Why has this memorial been placed here?” she asked. Bower appealed to Barth; but he shook his head. Karl gave details.

“A man fell on the Cima del Largo. They carried him here, and he died on that rock.”

“Poor fellow!” Some of the joyous light left Helen’s face. She had passed the cross before, and had regarded it as one of the votive offerings so common by the wayside in Catholic countries, knowing that in this part of Switzerland the Italian element predominated among the peasants.

“We get a fine view of the Cima del Largo from the cabane,” said Bower unconcernedly.

Helen picked a little blue flower that nestled at the base of the rock. She pinned it to her jersey without comment. Sometimes the callousness of a man was helpful, and the shadow of a bygone tragedy was out of keeping with the glow of this delightful valley.

The curving mass of the glacier was now clearly visible. It looked like some marble staircase meant to be trodden only by immortals. Ever broadening and ascending until it filled the whole width of the rift between the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand, where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the accumulation of winter débris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress. But that unpleasing glimpse of disruption was quickly dispelled by the magnificent volume and virgin purity of the glacier as a whole. Helen tried to imagine herself two miles distant, a tiny speck on the great floor of the pass. That was the only way to grasp its stupendous size, though she knew that it mounted through five miles of rock strewn ravine before it touched the precipitous saddle along which runs the border line between Italy and Switzerland.

Karl’s sigh of relief as he deposited his heavy load on a tablelike boulder brought Helen back from the land of dreams. To this sturdy peasant the wondrous Forno merely represented a day’s hard work, at an agreed sum of ten francs for carrying nearly half a hundredweight, and a liberal pour-boire if the voyageurs were satisfied.

Sandwiches and a glass of wine, diluted with water brought by the guide from a neighboring rill,—glacier water being used only as a last resource,—were delectable after a steady two hours’ walk. The early morning meal of coffee and a roll had lost some of its flavor when consumed apparently in the middle of the night, and Helen was ready now for her breakfast. While they were eating, Bower and Josef Barth cast glances at some wisps of cloud drifting slowly over the crests of the southern hills. Nothing was said. The guide read his patron’s wishes correctly. Unless some cause far more imperative than a slight mist intervened, the day’s programme must not be abandoned. So there was no loitering. The sun was almost in the valley, and the glacier must be crossed before the work of the night’s frost was undone.

When they stepped from the moraine on to the ice Barth led, Helen followed, Bower came next, with Karl in the rear.

If it had not been for the crisp crunching sound of the hobnails amid the loose fragments on the surface, and the ring of the pickel’s steel-shod butt on the solid mass beneath, Helen might have fancied that she was walking up an easy rock-covered slope. Any delusion on that point, however, was promptly dispelled by a glimpse of a narrow crevasse that split the foot of the glacier lengthwise.

She peered into its sea-green depths awesomely. It resembled a toothless mouth gaping slowly open, ready enough to swallow her, but too inert to put forth the necessary effort. And the thought reminded her of something. She halted and turned to Bower.

“Ought we not to be roped?” she asked.

He laughed, with the quiet confidence of the expert mountaineer. “Why?” he cried. “The way is clear. One does not walk into a crevasse with one’s eyes open.”

“But Stampa told me that I should refuse to advance a yard on ice or difficult rock without being roped.”

“Stampa, your cab driver?”

There was no reason that she could fathom why her elderly friend’s name should be repeated with such scornful emphasis.

“Ah, yes. He is that because he is lame,” she protested. “But he was one of the most famous guides in Zermatt years ago.”

She swung round and appealed to Barth, who was wondering why his employers were stopping before they had climbed twenty feet. “Are you from Zermatt?” she demanded.

“No, fräulein—from Pontresina. Zermatt is a long way from here.”

“But you know some of the Zermatt men, I suppose? Have you ever heard of Christian Stampa?”

“Most certainly, fräulein. My father helped him to build the first hut on the Hörnli Ridge.”

“Old Stampa!” chimed in Karl from beneath. “It will be long ere he is forgotten. I was one of four who carried him down from Corvatsch to Sils-Maria the day after he fell. He was making the descent by night,—a mad thing to do,—and there was murder in his heart, they said. But I never believed it. We shared a bottle of Monte Pulciano only yesterday, just for the sake of old times, and he was as merry as Hans von Rippach himself.”

Bower was stooping, so Helen could not see his face. He seemed to be fumbling with a boot lace.

“You hear, Mr. Bower?” she cried. “I am quoting no mean authority.”

He did not answer. He had untied the lace and was readjusting it. The girl realized that to a man of his portly build his present attitude was not conducive to speech. It had an additional effect which did not suggest itself to her. The effort thus demanded from heart and lungs might bring back the blood to a face blanched by a deadly fear.

Karl was stocked with reminiscences of Stampa. “I remember the time when people said Christian was the best man in the Bernina,” he said. “He would never go back to the Valais after his daughter died. It was a strange thing that he should come to grief on a cowherd’s track like that over Corvatsch. But Etta’s affair——”

“Schweige!” snarled Bower, straightening himself suddenly. His dark eyes shot such a gleam of lambent fury at the porter that the man’s jaw fell. The words were frozen on his lips. He could not have been stricken dumb more effectually had he come face to face with one of the horrific sprites described in the folklore of the hills.

Helen was surprised. What had poor Karl done that he should be bidden so fiercely to hold his tongue? Then she thought that Bower must have recalled Stampa’s history, and feared that perhaps the outspoken peasant might enter into a piquant account of some village scandal. A chambermaid in the hotel, questioned about Stampa, had told her that the daughter he loved so greatly had committed suicide. Really, she ought to be grateful to her companion for saving her from a passing embarrassment. But she had the tact not to drop the subject too quickly.

“If Barth and you agree that roping is unnecessary, of course I haven’t a word to say in the matter,” she volunteered. “It was rather absurd of me to mention it in the first instance.”

“No, you were right. I have never seen Stampa; but his name is familiar. It occurs in most Alpine records. Barth, fix the rope before we go farther. The fräulein wishes it.”

The rush of color induced by physical effort—effort of a tensity that Helen was wholly unaware of—was ebbing now before a numbing terror that had come to stay. His face was drawn and livid. His voice had the metallic ring in it that the girl had detected once already that day. Again she experienced a sense of bewilderment that he should regard a trivial thing so seriously. She was not a child. The world of to-day pulsated with far too many stories of tragic passion that she should be shielded so determinedly from any hint of an episode that doubtless wrung the heart’s core of this quiet valley one day in August sixteen years ago. In some slight degree Bower’s paroxysm of anger was a reflection on her own good taste, for she had unwittingly given rise to it.

Nevertheless, she felt indebted to him. To extricate both Bower and herself from an awkward situation she took a keen interest in Barth’s method of adjusting the rope. The man did not show any amazement at Bower’s order. He was there to earn his fee. Had these mad English told him to cut steps up the gentle slope in front he would have obeyed without protest, though it was more than strange that this much traveled voyageur should adopt such a needless precaution.

As a matter of fact, under Barth’s guidance, a blind cripple could have surmounted the first kilometer of the Forno glacier. The track lay close to the left bank of the moraine. It curved slightly to the right and soon the exquisite panorama of Monte Roseg, the Cima di Rosso, Monte Sissone, Piz Torrone, and the Castello group opened up before the climbers. Helen was enchanted. Twice she half turned to address some question to Bower; but on each occasion she happened to catch him in the act of swallowing some brandy from a flask. Governed by an unaccountable timidity, she pretended not to notice his actions, and diverted her words to Barth, who told her the names of the peaks and pointed to the junctions of minor ice fields with the main artery of the Forno.

Bower did not utter a syllable until they struck out toward the center of the glacier. A crevasse some ten feet in width and seemingly hundreds of feet deep, barred the way; but a bridge of ice, covered with snow, offered safe transit. The snow carpet showed that a number of climbers had passed quite recently in both directions. Even Helen, somewhat awed by the dimensions of the rift, understood that the existence of this natural arch was as well recognized by Alpinists as Waterloo Bridge is known to dwellers on the south side of the Thames.

“Now, Miss Wynton, you should experience your first real thrill,” said Bower. “This bridge forms here every year at this season, and an army might cross in safety. It is the genuine article, the first and strongest of a series. Yet here you cross the Rubicon. A mixture of metaphors is allowable in high altitudes, you know.”

Helen, almost startled at first by the unaffected naturalness of his words, was unfeignedly relieved at finding him restored to the normal. Usually his supply of light-hearted badinage was unceasing. He knew exactly when and how to season it with more serious statements. It is this rare quality that makes tolerable a long day’s solitude à deux.

She flourished her ice axe bravely.
Page [163]

“I am not Cæsar’s wife,” she replied; “but for the credit of womankind in general I shall act as though I was above suspicion—of nervousness.”

She did not look round. Barth was moving quickly, and she had no desire to burden him with a drag on the rope. When she was in the center of the narrow causeway, a snow cornice in the lip of the crevasse detached itself under the growing heat of the sun and shivered down into the green darkness. The incident brought her heart into her mouth. It served as a reminder that this solid ice river was really in a state of constant change and movement.

Bower laughed, with all his customary gayety of manner. “That came at a dramatic moment,” he said. “Too bad it could not let you pass without giving you a quake!”

“I am not a bit afraid.”

“Ah, but I can read your thoughts. There is a bond of sympathy between us.”

“Hemp is a non-conductor.”

“You are willfully misunderstanding me,” he retorted.

“No. I honestly believed you felt the rope quiver a little.”

“Alas! it is the atmosphere. My compliments fall on idle ears.”

Barth interrupted this play of harmless chaff by jerking some remark over his shoulder. “Looks like a guxe,” he said gruffly.

“Nonsense!” said Bower,—“a bank of mist. The sun will soon melt it.”

“It’s a guxe, right enough,” chimed in Karl, who had recovered his power of speech. “That is why the boy was blowing his horn—to show he was bringing the cattle home.”

“Well, then, push on. The sooner we are in the hut the better.”

“Please, what is a guxe?” asked Helen, when the men had nothing more to say.

“A word I would have wished to add later to your Alpine phrase book. It means a storm, a blizzard.”

“Should we not return at once in that event?”

“What? Who said just now she was not afraid?”

“But a storm in such a place!”

“These fellows smell a tourmente in every little cloud from the southwest. We may have some wind and a light snowfall, and that will be an experience for you. Surely you can trust me not to run any real risk?”

“Oh, yes. I do, indeed. But I have read of people being caught in these storms and suffering terribly.”

“Not on the Forno, I assure you. I don’t wish to minimize the perils of your first ascent; but it is only fair to say that this is an exhibition glacier. If it was nearer town you would find an orchestra in each amphitheater up there, with sideshows in every couloir. Jesting apart, you are absolutely safe with Barth and me, not to mention the irrepressible gentleman who carries our provisions.”

Helen was fully alive to the fact that a woman who joins a mountaineering party should not impose her personal doubts on men who are willing to go on. She flourished her ice ax bravely, and cried, “Excelsior!”

In the next instant she regretted her choice of expression. The moral of Longfellow’s poem might be admirable, but the fate of its hero was unpleasantly topical. Again Bower laughed.

“Ah!” he said. “Will you deny now that I am a first rate receiver of wireless messages?”

She had no breath left for a quip. Barth was hurrying, and the thin air was beginning to have its effect. When an unusually smooth stretch of ice permitted her to take her eyes from the track for a moment she looked back to learn the cause of such haste. To her complete astonishment, the Maloja Pass and the hills beyond it were dissolved in a thick mist. A monstrous cloud was sweeping up the Orlegna Valley. As yet, it was making for the Muretto Pass rather than the actual ravine of the Forno; but a few wraiths of vapor were sailing high overhead, and it needed no weatherwise native to predict that ere long the glacier itself would be covered by that white pall. She glanced at Bower.

He smiled cheerfully. “It is nothing,” he murmured.

“I really don’t care,” she said. “One does not shirk an adventure merely because it is disagreeable. The pity is that all this lovely sunshine must vanish.”

“It will reappear. You will be charmed with the novelty in an hour or less.”

“Is it far to the hut?”

“Hardly twenty minutes at our present pace.”

A growl from Barth stopped their brief talk. Another huge crevasse yawned in front. There was an ice bridge, with snow, like others they had crossed; but this was a slender structure, and the leader stabbed it viciously with the butt of his ax before he ventured on it. The others kept the rope taut, and he crossed safely. They followed. As Helen gained the further side she heard Bower’s chuckle:

“Another thrill!”

“I am growing quite used to them,” she said.

“Well, it may help somewhat if I tell you that the temporary departure of the sun will cause this particular bridge to be ten times as strong when we return.”

“Attention!” cried Barth, taking a sharp turn to the left. The meaning of his warning was soon apparent. They had to descend a few feet of rough ice, and Helen found, to her great relief it must be confessed, that they were approaching the lateral moraine. Already the sky was overcast. The glacier had taken to itself a cold grayness that was disconcerting. The heavy mist fell on them with inconceivable rapidity. Shining peaks and towering precipices of naked rock were swept out of sight each instant. The weather had changed with a magical speed. The mist advanced with the rush of an express train, and a strong wind sprang up as though it had burst through a restraining wall and was bent on overwhelming the daring mortals who were penetrating its chosen territory.

Somehow—anyhow—Helen scrambled on. She was obliged to keep eyes and mind intent on each step. Her chief object was to imitate Barth, to poise, and jump, and clamber with feet and hands exactly as he did. At this stage the rope was obviously a hindrance; but none of the men suggested its removal, and Helen had enough to occupy her wits without troubling them by a question. Even in the stress of her own breathless exertions she had room in her mind for a wondering pity for the heavily laden Karl. She marveled that anyone, be he strong as Samson, could carry such a load and not fall under it. Yet he was lumbering along behind Bower with a clumsy agility that was almost supernatural to her thinking. She was still unconscious of the fact that most of her own struggles were due more to the rarefied air than to the real difficulties of the route.

At last, when she really thought she must cry out for a rest, when a steeper climb than any hitherto encountered had bereft her almost of the power to take another upward spring to the ledge of some enormous boulder, when her knees and ankles were sore and bruised, and the skin of her fingers was beginning to fray under her stout gloves, she found herself standing on a comparatively level space formed of broken stones. A rough wall, surmounted by a flat pitched roof, stared at her out of the mist. In the center of the wall a small, square, shuttered window suggested a habitation. Her head swam, and her eyes ached dreadfully; but she knew that this was the hut, and strove desperately to appear self possessed.

“Accept my congratulations, Miss Wynton,” said a low voice at her ear. “Not one woman in a thousand would have gone through that last half-hour without a murmur. You are no longer a novice. Allow me to present you with the freedom of the Alps. This is one of the many châteaux at your disposal.”

A wild swirl of sleet lashed them venomously. This first whip of the gale seemed to have the spitefulness of disappointed rage.

Helen felt her arm grasped. Bower led her to a doorway cunningly disposed out of the path of the dreaded southwest wind. At that instant all the woman in her recognized that the man was big, and strong, and self reliant, and that it was good to have him near, shouting reassuring words that were whirled across the rock-crowned glacier by the violence of the tempest.

CHAPTER IX

“ETTA’S FATHER”

Though the hut was a crude thing, a triumph of essentials over luxuries, Helen had never before hailed four walls and a roof with such heartfelt, if silent, thanksgiving. She sank exhausted on a rough bench, and watched the matter-of-fact Engadiners unpacking the stores and firewood carried in their rucksacks. Their businesslike air supplied the tonic she needed. Though the howling storm seemed to threaten the tiny refuge with destruction, these two men set to work, coolly and methodically, to prepare a meal. Barth arranged the contents of Karl’s bulky package on a small table, and the porter busied himself with lighting a fire in a Swiss stove that stood in the center of the outer room. An inner apartment loomed black and uninviting through an open doorway. Helen discovered later that some scanty accommodation was provided there for those who meant to sleep in the hut in readiness for an early ascent, while it supplied a separate room in the event of women taking part in an expedition.

Bower offered her a quantity of brandy and water. She declined it, declaring that she needed only time to regain her breath. He was a man who might be trusted not to pester anyone with well meant but useless attentions. He went to the door, lit a cigarette, and seemed to be keenly interested in the sleet as it pelted the moraine or gathered in drifts in the minor fissures of the glacier.

Within a remarkably short space of time, Karl had concocted two cups of steaming coffee. Helen was then all aglow. Her strength was restored. The boisterous wind had crimsoned her cheeks beneath the tan. She had never looked such a picture of radiant womanhood as after this tussle with the storm. Luckily her clothing was not wet, since the travelers reached the cabane at the very instant the elements became really aggressive. It was a quite composed and reinvigorated Helen who summoned Bower from his contemplation of the weather portents.

“We may be besieged,” she cried; “but at any rate we are not on famine rations. What a spread! You could hardly have brought more food if you fancied we might be kept here a week.”

The sustained physical effort called for during the last part of the climb seemed to have dispelled his fit of abstraction. Being an eminently adaptable man, he responded to her mood. “Ah, that sounds more like the enthusiast who set forth so gayly from the Kursaal this morning,” he answered, pulling the door ajar before he took a seat by her side on the bench. “A few minutes ago you were ready to condemn me as several kinds of idiot for going on in the teeth of our Switzers’ warnings. Now, confess!”

“I don’t think I could have climbed another ten yards,” she admitted.

“Our haste was due to Barth’s anxiety. He wanted to save you from a drenching. It was a near thing, and with the thermometer falling a degree a minute soaked garments might have brought very unpleasant consequences. But that was our only risk. Old mountaineer as I am, I hardly expected such a blizzard in August, after such short notice too. Otherwise, now that we are safely housed, you are fortunate in securing a memorable experience. The storm will soon blow over; but it promises to be lively while it lasts.”

Helen was sipping her coffee. Perhaps her eyes conveyed the question her tongue hesitated to utter. Bower smiled pleasantly, and gesticulated with hands and shoulders in a way that was foreign to his studiously cultivated English habit of repose. Indeed, with his climber’s garb he seemed to have acquired a new manner. There was a perplexing change in him since the morning.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand perfectly. You and I might sing lieder ohne worte, Miss Wynton. I have known these summer gales to last four days; but pray do not be alarmed,” for Helen nearly dropped her cup in quick dismay; “my own opinion is that we shall have a delightful afternoon. Of course, I am a discredited prophet. Ask Barth.”

The guide, hearing his name mentioned, glanced at them, though he was engaged at the moment in taking the wrappings off a quantity of bread, cold chicken, and slices of ham and beef. He agreed with Bower. The barometer stood high when they left the hotel. He thought, as all men think who live in the open, that “the sharper the blast the sooner it’s past.”

“Moreover,” broke in Karl, who refused to be left out of the conversation, “Johann Klucker’s cat was sitting with its back to the stove last evening.”

This bit of homely philosophy brought a ripple of laughter from Helen, whereupon Karl explained.

“Cats are very wise, fräulein. Johann Klucker’s cat is old. Therefore she is skilled in reading the tokens of the weather. A cat hates wind and rain, and makes her arrangements accordingly. If she washes herself smoothly, the next twelve hours will be fine. If she licks against the grain, it will be wet. When she lies with her back to the fire, there will surely be a squall. When her tail is up and her coat rises, look out for wind.”

“Johann Klucker’s cat has settled the dispute,” said Bower gravely in English. “A squall it is,—a most suitable prediction for a cat,—and I am once more rehabilitated in your esteem, I hope?”

A cold iridescence suddenly illumined the gloomy interior of the hut. It gave individuality to each particle of sleet whirling past the door. Helen thought that the sun had broken through the storm clouds for an instant; but Bower said quietly:

“Are you afraid of lightning?”

“Not very. I don’t like it.”

“Some people collapse altogether when they see it. Perhaps when forewarned you are forearmed.”

A low rumble boomed up the valley, and the mountain echoes muttered in solemn chorus.

“We are to be spared none of the scenic accessories, then?” said Helen.

“None. In fact, you will soon see and hear a thunder storm that would have delighted Gustave Doré. Please remember that it cannot last long, and that this hut has been built twenty years to my knowledge.”

Helen sipped her coffee, but pushed away a plate set before her by Barth. “If you don’t mind, I should like the door wide open,” she said.

“You prefer to lunch later?”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to face the music—is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Let me remind you that Jove’s thunderbolts are really forged on the hilltops.”

“I am here; so I must make the best of it. I shall not scream, or faint, if that is what you dread.”

“I dread nothing but your anger for not having turned back when a retreat was possible. I hate turning back, Miss Wynton. I have never yet withdrawn from any enterprise seriously undertaken, and I was determined to share your first ramble among my beloved hills.”

Another gleam of light, bluer and more penetrating than its forerunner, lit the brown rafters of the cabane. It was succeeded by a crash like the roar of massed artillery. The walls trembled. Some particles of mortar rattled noisily to the floor. A strange sound of rending, followed by a heavy thud, suggested something more tangible than thunderbolts. Bower kicked the door and it swung inward.

“An avalanche,” he said. “Probably a rockfall too. Of course, the hut stands clear of the track of unpleasant visitors of that description.”

Helen had not expected this courageous bearing in a man of Bower’s physical characteristics. Hitherto she had regarded him as somewhat self indulgent, a Sybarite, the product of modernity in its London aspects. His demeanor in the train, in the hotel, bespoke one accustomed to gratify the flesh, who found all the world ready to pander to his desires. Again she was conscious of that instinctive trustfulness a woman freely reposes in a dominant man. Oddly enough, she thought of Spencer in the same breath. An hour earlier, had she been asked which of these two would command her confidence during a storm, her unhesitating choice would have favored the American. Now, she was at least sure that Bower’s coolness was not assumed. His attitude inspired emulation. She rose and went to the door.

“I want to see an avalanche,” she cried. “Where did that one fall?”

Bower followed her. He spoke over her shoulder. “On Monte Roseg, I expect. The weather seems to be clearing slightly. This tearing wind will soon roll up the mist, and the thunder will certainly start another big rock or a snowslide. If you are lucky, you may witness something really fine.”

A dazzling flash leaped over the glacier. Although the surrounding peaks were as yet invisible through the haze of sleet and vapor, objects near at hand were revealed with uncanny distinctness. Each frozen wave on the surface of the ice was etched in sharp lines. A cluster of séracs on a neighboring icefall showed all their mad chaos. The blue green chasm of a huge crevasse was illumined to a depth far below any point to which the rays of the sun penetrated. On the neighboring slope of Monte Roseg the crimson and green and yellow mosses were given sudden life against the black background of rock. Every boulder here wore a somber robe. They were stark and grim. The eye instantly caught the contrast to their gray-white fellows piled on the lower moraine or in the bed of the Orlegna.

Helen was quick to note the new tone of black amid the vividly white patches of snow. She waited until the deafening thunder peal was dying away in eerie cadences. “Why are the rocks black here and almost white in the valley?” she asked.

“Because they are young, as rocks go,” was the smiling answer. “They have yet to pass through the mill. They will be battered and bruised and polished before they emerge from the glacier several years hence and a few miles nearer peace. In that they resemble men. ’Pon my word, Miss Wynton, you have caused me to evolve a rather poetic explanation of certain gray hairs I have noticed of late among my own raven locks.”

“You appear to know and love these hills so well that I wonder—if you will excuse a personal remark—I wonder you ever were able to tear yourself away from them.”

“I have missed too much of real enjoyment in the effort to amass riches,” he said slowly. “Believe me, that thought has held me since—since you and I set foot on the Forno together.”

“But you knew? You were no stranger to the Alps? I am beginning to understand that one cannot claim kinship with the high places until they stir the heart more in storm than in sunshine. When I saw all these giants glittering in the sun like knights in silver armor, I described them to myself as gloriously beautiful. Now I feel that they are more than that,—they are awful, pitiless in their indifference to frail mortals; they carry me into a dim region where life and death are terms without meaning.”

“Yes, that is the true spirit of the mountains. I too used to look on them with affectionate reverence, and you recall the old days. Perhaps, if I am deemed worthy, you will teach me the cult once more.”

He bent closer. Helen became conscious that in her enthusiasm she had spoken unguardedly. She moved away, slightly but unmistakably, a step or two out into the open, for the hut on that side was not exposed to the bitter violence of the wind.

“It is absurd to imagine us in a change of rôle,” she cried. “I should play the poorest travesty of Mentor to your Telemachus. Oh! What is that?”

While she was speaking, another blinding flare of lightning flooded moraine and glacier and pierced the veil of sleet. Her voice rose almost to a shriek. Bower sprang forward. His left hand rested reassuringly across her shoulders.

“Better come inside the hut,” he began.

“But I saw someone—a white face—staring at me down there!”

“It is possible. There is no cause for fear. A party may have crossed from Italy. There would be none from the Maloja at this hour.”

Helen was actually trembling. Bower drew her a little nearer. He himself was unnerved, a prey to wilder emotions than she could guess till later days brought a fuller understanding. It was a mad trick of fate that threw the girl into his embrace just then, for another far-flung sheet of fire revealed to her terrified vision the figures of Spencer and Stampa on the rocks beneath. With brutal candor, the same flash showed her nestling close to Bower. For some reason, she shuddered. Though the merciful gloom of the next few seconds restored her faculties, her face and neck were aflame. She almost felt that she had been detected in some fault. Her confusion was not lessened by hearing a muttered curse from her companion. Careless of the stinging sleet, she leaped down to a broad tier of rock below the plateau of the hut and cried shrilly:

“Is that really you, Mr. Spencer?”