person; but
she became more and more convinced that Winn was a knight errant in
disguise and had been sent by heaven to her direct assistance.

Claire believed very strongly in heaven. If you have no parents and very
disagreeable relatives, heaven becomes extremely important. Claire
didn't think it was at all the place her aunt and uncle vaguely held out
to her as a kind of permanent and compulsory pew into which an angelic
verger conducted the more respectable after death.

Everything Mr. and Mrs. Tighe considered the laws of God seemed to
Claire unlikely to be the laws of anybody except people like Mr. and
Mrs. Tighe; but she did believe that God looked after Maurice and
herself, and she was anxious that He should look particularly after
Maurice.

She determined that on the day she went to the Schatz Alp with Major
Staines she would take him into her confidence. She could explain the
position of women to him while they climbed the Rhueti-Weg; this would
give them all of lunch for Maurice's future, and she hoped without
direct calculations--because, although Claire generally had very strong
purposes, she seldom had calculations--that perhaps if she was lucky he
would tell her about tigers on the way down.

It was one of those mornings at Davos which seemed made out of fragrance
and crystal. The sun soaked into the pines, the sky above the tree-tops
burned like blue flame. It was the first time in Claire's life that she
had gone out all by herself to lunch with a grown-up man. Winn was far
more important than a mere boy, besides being a major.

She had been planning all the morning during her skating what arguments
she should use to Winn on the subject of women, but when she saw him in
the hall everything went out of her head. She only knew that it was a
heavenly day and that it seemed extraordinarily difficult not to dance.

It was a long walk up to the Schatz Alp; there were paths where the
pine-trees met overhead, garlanded with wreaths of snow, and the spaces
between the wreaths were as blue as love-in-a-mist, an old-fashioned
flower that grows in English gardens. Claire pointed it out to Winn.

"Only," she said, "up here there isn't any mist, is there?"

"No," said Winn, looking at her in a curious way; "as far as I can see,
there is none whatever. By the by, that particular flower you mention
isn't only called love-in-a-mist, it's also called devil-in-a-bush."

"But that's a pity," said Claire, decisivel