on of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred
consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within
him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter
self-disgust.

The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep,
had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still
regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after
the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the
fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. "After all," he
said to himself, "there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is
a cad, in the presence of a gentleman."

CHAPTER X

ON a Sunday afternoon, early in February, Thorpe journeyed with his
niece and nephew from Bern to Montreux.

The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at
the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the
steam from the window with a napkin out of the lunch-basket. They both
stared a good deal through this window, with frequent exclamations of
petulance.

"Isn't it too provoking!" cried the girl, turning to her uncle at last.
"This is where we are now--according to Baedeker: 'As the train proceeds
we enjoy a view of the Simmen-Thal and Freiburg mountains to the left,
the Moleson being conspicuous.' And look at it! For all one can see, we
might as well be at Redhill."

"It is pretty hard luck," Thorpe assented, passively glancing past her
at the pale, neutral-tinted wall of mist which obscured the view. "But
hang it all--it must clear up some time. Just you have patience, and
you'll see some Alps yet."

"Where we're going," the young man interposed, "the head-porter told me
it was always cloudier than anywhere else."

"I don't think that can be so," Thorpe reasoned, languidly, from his
corner. "It's a great winter resort, I'm told, and it rather stands to
reason, doesn't it? that people wouldn't flock there if it was so bad as
all that."

"The kind of people we've seen travelling in Switzerland," said the
girl--"they would do anything."

Thorpe smiled, with tolerant good humour. "Well, you can comfort
yourself with the notion that you'll be coming again. The mountains'll
stay here, all right," he assured her. The young people smiled back
at him, and with this he rearranged his feet in a new posture on the
opposite seat, lighted another cigar, and pillowed his head once more
agai