happened,
the ultimate, unavoidable, coarse, "disagreeable." It was her last
evening in that wrappered life against which she had rebelled. Warm
reality was now so near her she could hear it beating in her ears. Away
in London even now Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic man
whose touch turned one to trembling fire. What was he doing? What was he
thinking? It was less than a day now, less than twenty hours. Seventeen
hours, sixteen hours. She glanced at the soft-ticking clock with the
exposed brass pendulum upon the white marble mantel, and made a rapid
calculation. To be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.
The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting. The softly
glittering summer stars! She saw them shining over mountains of snow,
over valleys of haze and warm darkness.... There would be no moon.

"I believe after all it's coming out!" said Miss Stanley. "The aces made
it easy."

Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat up in her chair, became
attentive. "Look, dear," she said presently, "you can put the ten on the
Jack."

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

IN THE MOUNTAINS

Part 1

Next day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like newborn things. It seemed
to them they could never have been really alive before, but only
dimly anticipating existence. They sat face to face beneath an
experienced-looking rucksack and a brand new portmanteau and a leather
handbag, in the afternoon-boat train that goes from Charing Cross to
Folkestone for Boulogne. They tried to read illustrated papers in an
unconcerned manner and with forced attention, lest they should catch
the leaping exultation in each other's eyes. And they admired Kent
sedulously from the windows.

They crossed the Channel in sunshine and a breeze that just ruffled the
sea to glittering scales of silver. Some of the people who watched them
standing side by side thought they must be newly wedded because of their
happy faces, and others that they were an old-established couple because
of their easy confidence in each other.

At Boulogne they took train to Basle; next morning they breakfasted
together in the buffet of that station, and thence they caught the
Interlaken express, and so went by way of Spies to Frutigen. There was
no railway beyond Frutigen in those days; they sent their baggage by
post to Kandersteg, and walked along the mule path to the left of the
stream to that queer hollow among the precipices, Blau See, wh