of her discontent was just a woman's jealousy of a younger
rival. Men were beginning to turn from her toward her daughter. That
Sylvia never competed only made the sting the sharper. The grave face
with its perfect oval, which smiled so rarely, but in so winning a way,
its delicate color, its freshness, were points which she could not
forgive her daughter. She felt faded and yellow beside her, she rouged
more heavily on account of her, she looked with more apprehension at the
crow's-feet which were beginning to show about the corners of her eyes,
and the lines which were beginning to run from the nostrils to the
corners of her mouth.

Sylvia reached the hotel in time for dinner, and as she sat with her
mother, drinking her coffee in the garden afterward, Monsieur Pettigrat
planted himself before the little iron table.

He shook his head, which was what his friends called "leonine."

"Mademoiselle," he said, in his most impressive voice, "I envy you."

Sylvia looked up at him with a little smile of mischief upon her lips.

"And why, monsieur?"

He waved his arm magnificently.

"I watched you at dinner. You are of the elect, mademoiselle, for whom
the snow peaks have a message."

Sylvia's smile faded from her face.

"Perhaps so, monsieur," she said, gravely, and her mother
interposed testily:

"A message! Ridiculous! There are only two words in the message, my dear.
Cold-cream! and be sure you put it on your face before you go to bed."

Sylvia apparently did not hear her mother's comment. At all events she
disregarded it, and Monsieur Pettigrat once again shook his head at
Sylvia with a kindly magnificence.

"They have no message for me, mademoiselle," he said, with a sigh, as
though he for once regretted that he was so uncommon. "I once went up
there to see." He waved his hand generally to the chain of Mont Blanc and
drifted largely away.

Mrs. Thesiger, however, was to hear more definitely of that message two
days later. It was after dinner. She was sitting in the garden with her
daughter on a night of moonlight; behind them rose the wall of
mountains, silent and shadowed, in front were the lights of the little
town, and the clatter of its crowded streets. Between the town and the
mountains, at the side of the hotel this garden lay, a garden of grass
and trees, where the moonlight slept in white brilliant pools of light,
or dripped between the leaves of the branches. It partook alike of the
silence of th