too much respect for my
bones. It's awfully tricky; I've gone down from below it. You don't get
such a speed on then."

"Oh, Major Staines, you won't toboggan?" Claire cried out. "You know you
mustn't toboggan! Dr. Gurnet said you mustn't. You won't, will you?
Captain Drummond, aren't you going with him to stop him?"

Lionel laughed.

"He isn't a very easy person to stop," he answered her. "I'll join him
later on, of course; but I want to see a little more of Davos before I
go."

"There isn't the slightest danger," Winn remarked, without meeting
Claire's eyes. "The Cresta's as safe as a church hassock. There isn't
half the skill in tobogganing that there is in skating. Good-by, Miss
Rivers. I never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed our skating
competition. I'm most grateful to you for putting up with me."

Claire gave him her hand then, but Winn remembered afterward that she
never said good-by. She looked at him as if he had done something which
was not fair.

CHAPTER XXI

Winn's chief objection to St. Moritz was the shabby way in which it
imitated Davos. It had all the same materials--endless snows, forests of
fir-trees, soaring peaks and the serene blueness of the skies--and yet
as Davos it didn't in the least come off. It was more beautiful and less
definite; the peaks were nearer and higher; they streamed out around the
valley like an army with banners. The long, low lake and the small,
perched villages, grossly overtopped by vulgar hotel palaces, had a far
more fugitive air.

It was a place without a life of its own. Whatever character St. Moritz
might once have had was as lost as that of the most catholic of evening
ladies in Piccadilly.

Davos had had the dignity of its purpose; it had set out to heal. St.
Moritz, on the contrary, set out to avoid healing. It was haunted by
crown princes and millionaire Jews, ladies with incredible ear-rings
and priceless furs; sharp, little, baffling trans-atlantic children
thronged its narrow streets, and passed away from it as casually as a
company of tramps.

There was this advantage for Winn: nobody wanted to be friendly unless
one was a royalty or a financial magnate. Winn was as much alone as if
he had dropped from Charing Cross into the Strand. He smoked, read his
paper, and investigated in an unaccommodating spirit all that St. Moritz
provided; but he didn't have to talk.

Winn was suffering from a not uncommon predicament: he had done the
ri