lf, with an anxious, almost
affectionate manner... "Ill? Not dangerously, _au moins_."

He said _au mouain_, and the word recurred in all his remarks, with
other vocable parasites, such as _he, que, tey zou, ve, vai, et
autrement, differemment_, etc., still further emphasized by a Southern
accent, displeasing, apparently, to the young lady, for she answered
with a glacial glance of a black blue, the blue of an abyss.

His neighbour on the right had nothing encouraging about him either;
this was the Italian tenor, a gay bird with a low forehead, oily pupils,
and the moustache of a matador, which he twirled with nervous fingers
at being thus separated from his pretty neighbour. But the good Alpinist
had a habit of talking as he ate; it was necessary for his health.

"_Ve!_ the pretty buttons..." he said to himself, aloud, eying the cuffs
of his neighbour. "Notes of music, inlaid in jasper--why, the effect is
_charmain!_.."

His metallic voice rang on the silence, but found no echo.

"Surely monsieur is a singer, _que?_"

"_Non capisco_," growled the Italian into his moustache.

For a moment the man resigned himself to devour without uttering a word,
but the morsels choked him. At last, as his opposite neighbour, the
Austro-Hungarian diplomat, endeavoured to reach the mustard-pot with the
tips of his shaky old fingers, covered with mittens, he passed it to him
obligingly. "Happy to serve you, Monsieur le baron," for he had heard
some one call him so.

Unfortunately, poor M. de Stoltz, in spite of his shrewd and knowing air
contracted in diplomatic juggling, had now lost both words and ideas,
and was travelling among the mountains for the special purpose of
recovering them. He opened his eyes wide upon that unknown face, and
shut them again without a word. It would have taken ten old diplomats of
his present intellectual force to have constructed in common a formula
of thanks.

At this fresh failure the Alpinist made a terrible grimace, and the
abrupt manner in which he seized the bottle standing near him might have
made one fear he was about to cleave the already cracked head of the
diplomatist Not so! It was only to offer wine to his pretty neighbour,
who did not hear him, being absorbed by a semi-whispered conversation in
a soft and lively foreign warble with two young men seated next to her.
She bent to them, and grew animated. Little frizzles of hair were seen
shining in the light against a dainty, transparen