er palms. Two photographs,
propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She
snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom;
only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it
was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was
prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other
photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was
that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt
from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair
was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered
with a veil of fine lace.

"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away
from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims
for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"

But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just
indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he
must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question
was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been
thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere
of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had
combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put
on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned
out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only
on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of
ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling,
falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air
deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray
cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the
blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp
and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear
against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its
secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green,
looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in
Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet
for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At
any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that
lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archi