hout being
anything like so grave.

They were all playing a game, and she was the leader. They would have
let her break the rules if she had wanted to break them! but she
wouldn't have let herself.

Of course the hotel didn't approve of her; no hotel could be expected to
approve of a situation which it so much enjoyed. Besides Claire was
lawless; she kept her own rules, but she broke everybody else's. She
never sought a chaperon or accepted some older woman's sheltering
presence; she never sat in the ladies' salon or went to tea with the
chaplain's wife. On one dreadful occasion she tobogganed wilfully on a
Sunday, under the chaplain's nose, with a man who had arrived only the
night before.

When old Mrs. Stewart, who knitted regularly by the winter and counted
almost as many scandals as stitches, took her up on the subject out of
kindness of heart, Claire had said without meaning to be rude:

"I really don't think the chaplain's nose ought to be there, to _be_
under, do you?"

Of course, Mrs. Stewart did. She had the highest respect for the
chaplain's nose; but it wasn't the kind of subject you could argue
about.

For a long time Claire and Winn never really talked; she threw words at
him over her shoulder or in the hall or when he put her skates on or
took them off at the rink. He seemed to get there quicker than any one
else, though the operation itself was sometimes a little prolonged. Of
course there were meals, but meals belonged to Maurice, and Claire had
a way of always slipping behind him, so that it was really over the
skates that Winn discovered how awfully clever she was.

She read books, deep books; why, even Hall Caine and Marie Corelli
didn't satisfy her, and Winn had always thought those famous authors the
last words in modern literature. He now learned others. She gave him
Conrad to read, and Meredith. He got stuck in Meredith, but he liked
Conrad; it made him smell the mud and feel again the silence of the
jungle.

"Funny," he explained to Claire, "because when you come to think of it,
he doesn't actually write about the smell; only he's got it, and the
jungle feeling, too. It's quiet, you know, in there, but not a bit like
the snows out here; there's nothing doing up in this snow, but God alone
knows what's happening in the jungle. Odd how there can be two sorts of
quiet, ain't it?"

"There can be two sorts of anything," said Claire, exultantly. "Oh, not
only two--dozens; that's why it's