of us."

Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? What aim in view have
these most woeful captives? Horror shrouds it, and shame reddens
through the folds to tell of innermost horror.

"Take me back to the mountains, if you please, Mr. Whitford," Miss
Middleton said, fallen out of sympathy with him. "Captives have death
in view, but that is not an aim."

"Why may not captives expect a release?"

"Hardly from a tyrant."

"If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the tyrant dies?"

"The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skeleton. But why will
you talk of skeletons! The very name of mountain seems life in
comparison with any other subject."

"I assure you," said Vernon, with the fervour of a man lighting on an
actual truth in his conversation with a young lady, "it's not the first
time I have thought you would be at home in the Alps. You would walk
and climb as well as you dance."

She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her having been
thought of, and giving him friendly eyes, barely noticing that he was
in a glow, she said: "If you speak so encouragingly I shall fancy we
are near an ascent."

"I wish we were," said he.

"We can realize it by dwelling on it, don't you think?"

"We can begin climbing."

"Oh!" she squeezed herself shadowily.

"Which mountain shall it be?" said Vernon, in the right real earnest
tone.

Miss Middleton suggested a lady's mountain first, for a trial. "And
then, if you think well enough of me--if I have not stumbled more than
twice, or asked more than ten times how far it is from the top, I
should like to be promoted to scale a giant."

They went up to some of the lesser heights of Switzerland and Styria,
and settled in South Tyrol, the young lady preferring this district for
the strenuous exercise of her climbing powers because she loved Italian
colour; and it seemed an exceedingly good reason to the genial
imagination she had awakened in Mr. Whitford. "Though," said he,
abruptly, "you are not so much Italian as French."

She hoped she was English, she remarked.

"Of course you are English; . . . yes." He moderated his ascent with
the halting affirmative.

She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent hesitation.

"Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits, French
impatience," he lowered his voice, "and charm"

"And love of compliments."

"Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them"

"And a disposition to rebel?"