bald Toovey.
Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came
climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a
knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood
on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up,
smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not
Archibald Toovey.

Mildred, relieved from the worst of fears, leaned from the window
towards him. A slanting ray caught the floating cloud of her amber hair,
her face glowed rosily, her eyes beamed on the new-comer, and she broke
into such an enchanting ripple of laughter as he had never heard from
those soft lips since it had been his privilege to kiss them. Then
something happened within him. Upon his lonely walk he had been overcome
by a depression against which he had every day been struggling. He had
been disappointed in his marriage, now some weeks old--disappointed,
that is, with himself, because of his own incapacity for rapturous
happiness. Yet a year ago on the ice at Oxford, six months ago in the
falling summer twilight on the river, under Wytham Woods, he had thought
himself as capable as any man of feeling the joys and pains of love. In
the sequel it had seemed that he was not; and just as he had lost all
hope of finding once again that buried treasure of his heart, it had
returned to him in one delightful moment, when he stood as it were on
the top of the world in the crisp, joyous Alpine air, and his eyes met
the eyes of his young wife, who leaned towards him into the sunshine and
laughed. He could not possibly have told how long the golden vision
endured; only that suddenly, precipitately, it withdrew. A "spirit in
his feet" sent him bounding up the bare, shallow hotel stairs, two steps
at a time, dropping on every step a cake of snow from his boots, to melt
and make pools on the polished wood. The manager, who respected none of
his guests except those who bullied him, called out a reprimand, but
received no apology.

Stewart strode with echoing tread down the corridor towards No. 19,
eager to hold that slender, girlish wife of his in his arms and to press
kisses on the lips that had laughed at him so sweetly from above. The
walls of the hotel were thin, and as he approached the door he heard a
quick, soft scurry across the room on the other side, and in his swift
thought saw Milly flying to meet him, just relieved from one absurd
anxiety about