stick toward the
lighted windows. "Listen a minute, and then tell me!"

And we listened together to the last and clearest rendering of the
refrain--

"Then tell me how to woo thee, Love;
O tell me how to woo thee!
For thy dear sake, nae care I'll take,
Tho' ne'er another trow me!"

"What tosh!" shouted Bob (his mother should have heard him) through the
applause. "Of course I'm going to take care of myself, and of course I
meant to rush the Matterhorn while I'm here, but between ourselves
that's my only reason for rushing it to-night."

Yet had he no boyish vision of quick promotion in the lady's heart, no
primitive desire to show his mettle out of hand, to set her trembling
while he did or died? He had, I thought, and he had not; that shining
face could only have reflected a single and candid heart. But it is
these very natures, so simple and sweet-hearted and transparent, that
are least to be trusted on the subject of their own motives and
emotions, for they are the soonest deceived, not only by others but in
themselves. Or so I venture to think, and even then reflected, as I
shook my dear lad's hand by the side parapet of the moonlit terrace, and
watched him run down into the shadows of the fir-trees and so out of my
sight with two dark and stalwart figures that promptly detached
themselves from the shadows of the shoemaker's hut. A third figure
mounted to where I now sat listening to the easy, swinging, confident
steps, as they fell fainter and fainter upon the ear; it was the
shoemaker himself who had shod my two sticks with spikes and my boots
with formidable nails; and we exchanged a few words in a mixture of
languages which I should be very sorry to reproduce.

"Do you know those two guides?" is what I first asked in effect.

"Very well, monsieur."

"Are they good guides?"

"The very best, monsieur."

CHAPTER X

THE LAST WORD

"Is that you?"

It was an hour or so later, but still I sat ruminating upon the parapet,
within a yard or two of the spot where I had first accosted Bob Evers
and Mrs. Lascelles. I had retraced the little sequence of subsequent
events, paltry enough in themselves, yet of a certain symmetry and some
importance as a whole. I had attacked and defended my own conduct down
to that hour, when I ought to have been formulating its logical
conclusion, and during my unprofitable deliberations the night had aged
and altered (as it were) behind my back. There was