n in the world about them. Although Charles
was only one and twenty, Mary Knollys was barely eighteen, and to her
he seemed godlike in his age, as in all other things. Her life had
been as simple as it had been short. She remembered being a little
girl, and then the next thing that occurred was Charles Knollys, and
positively the next thing she remembered of importance was being Mrs.
Charles Knollys; so that old Mrs. Knollys, her guardian aunt and his,
had first called her a love of a baby, and then but a baby in love.
All this, of course, was five and forty years ago, for you know how
old she was when she went again to Switzerland last summer--three and
sixty.

They first saw the great mountains from the summit of the Schafberg.
This is a little height, three-cornered, between three lakes; a
natural Belvedere for Central Europe. Mr. and Mrs. Knollys were seated
on a couch of Alpine roses behind a rhododendron bush watching the
sunset; but as Charles was desirous of kissing Mrs. Knollys, and the
rhododendron bush was not thick enough, they were waiting for the sun
to go down. He was very slow in doing this, and by way of consolation
Knollys was keeping his wife's hand hidden in the folds of her dress.
Undoubtedly a modern lady would have been talking of the scenery,
giving word-color pictures of the view; but I am afraid Mrs. Knollys
had been looking at her husband, and talking with him of the cottage
they had bought in a Surrey village, not far from Box Hill, and
thinking how the little carvings and embroideries would look there
which they had bought abroad. And, indeed, Mrs. Charles secretly
thought Box Hill an eminence far preferable to the Venediger, and
Charles's face an infinitely more interesting sight than any lake,
however expressive. But the sun, looking askance at them through the
lower mist, was not jealous; all the same he spread his glory lavishly
for them, and the bright little mirror of a lake twinkled cannily
upward from below. Finally it grew dark; then there was less talking.
It was full night when they went in, she leaning on his arm and
looking up; and the moonbeam on the snowy shoulder of the Glockner,
twenty leagues away, came over, straight-way, from the mountain to her
face. Three days later, Charles Knollys, crossing with her the lower
portion of the Pasterzen glacier, slipped into a crevasse, and
vanished utterly from the earth.

II.

All this you know. And I was