"Look out!" cried the Captain.

In vain! He himself might perhaps have escaped, but he could not abandon
his Countess in the moment of peril, and the Countess could only move
after much thought and many efforts, being scarce more advanced than
Nellie. Nellie's wilful planks quite ignored the curve, and, as it were
afloat on them, she charged off the track, and into the Captain and the
Countess. The impact was tremendous. Six skis waved like semaphores in
the air. Then all was still. Then, as the beholders hastened to the
scene of the disaster, the Countess laughed and Nellie laughed. The
laugh of the Captain was not heard. The sole casualty was a wound about
a foot long in the hinterland of the Captain's unique knicker-bockers.
And as threads of that beautiful check pattern were afterwards found
attached to the wheel of Nellie's pole, the cause of the wound was
indisputable. The Captain departed home, chiefly backwards, but with
great rapidity.

In the afternoon Denry went down to Montreux and returned with an opal
bracelet, which Nellie wore at dinner.

"Oh! What a ripping bracelet!" said a girl.

"Yes," said Nellie. "My husband gave it me only to-day."

"I suppose it's your birthday or something," the inquisitive girl
ventured.

"No," said Nellie.

"How nice of him!" said the girl.

The next day Captain Deverax appeared in riding breeches. They were not
correct for ski-running, but they were the best he could do. He visited
a tailor's in Montreux.

V

The Countess Ruhl had a large sleigh of her own, also a horse; both were
hired from Montreux. In this vehicle, sometimes alone, sometimes with a
male servant, she would drive at Russian speed over the undulating
mountain roads; and for such expeditions she always wore a large red
cloak with a hood. Often she was thus seen, in the afternoon; the
scarlet made a bright moving patch on the vast expanses of snow. Once,
at some distance from the village, two tale-tellers observed a man on
skis careering in the neighbourhood of the sleigh. It was Captain
Deverax. The flirtation, therefore, was growing warmer and warmer. The
hotels hummed with the tidings of it. But the Countess never said
anything; nor could anything be extracted from her by even the most
experienced gossips. She was an agreeable but a mysterious woman, as
befitted a Russian Countess. Again and again were she and the Captain
seen together afar off in the landscape. Certainly it was a novelty