the afternoon in
the pleasant spaces by the lake, only the servants, of the great empty
hotel passed at rare intervals. Of Lucia I saw nothing, till the Count
and Henry passed in with their guns and found me with my book.

"Have you been alone all the afternoon?" they said, innocently enough.
And it was some consolation to answer "Yes," and so to receive their
sympathy.

Henry came again to me after dinner. The Count was going over the hills
to the Forno glacier, and had asked him; but he would not go unless I
wished it. I bade him take my blessing and depart, and again he thanked
me.

There was that night a band of thirty excellent performers to discourse
music to the guests at the table--being, as the saw says, us four and no
more. But the Count was greatly at his ease, and told us tales of the
forests of Russia, of wolf-hunts, and of other hunts when the wolves
were the hunters--tales to make the blood run cold, yet not amiss being
recounted over a bottle of Forzato in the bright dining-room. For,
though it was the beginning of May, the fire was sparkling and roaring
upwards to dispel the chill which fell with the evening in these high
regions.

There is talk of mountaineering and of the English madness for it. The
Count and Henry Fenwick are on a side. Henry has been over long by
himself on the Continent. He is at present all for sport. Every day he
must kill something, that he may have something to show. The Countess is
for the hills, as I am, and the _elan_ of going ever upward. So we fall
to talk about the mountains that are about us, and the Count says that
it is an impossibility to climb them at this season of the year.
Avalanches are frequent, and the cliffs are slippery with the daily
sun-thaw congealing in thin sheets upon the rocks. He tells us that
there is one peak immediately behind the hotel which yet remains
unclimbed. It is the Piz Langrev, and it rises like a tower. No man
could climb that mural precipice and live.

I tell them that I have never climbed in this country; but that I do not
believe that there is a peak in, the world which cannot in some fashion
or another be surmounted--time, money, and pluck being provided
wherewith to do it.

"You have a fine chance, my friend," says the Count kindly, "for you
will be canonised by the guides if you find a way up the front of the
Langrev. They would at once clap on a tariff which would make their
fortunes, in order to tempt your wise countrymen