itae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I
feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."

"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never
see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself
deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at
his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of
granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender,
shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the
foreknowledge of dawn.

Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as
a young birch-tree, a cluster of roses at her waist, her expressive
face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly,
girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks
glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and
jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never
been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living
vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent,
the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned
pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress
and person; savoured to the full her very individual--if, at times,
thorn-set--charm. He was a connoisseur of woman--of their moods, their
minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack--this man whose
career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental
friendship, innocuous and otherwise.

During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in
a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for
the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his
reckoning.

An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was
beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-assurance, he
had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship
was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach,
airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely
desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on
this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be
made to realise it also.

Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look
of hers which had been larg