s--"I took it for
granted you were showing Miss Madden around."

"It 's quite the other way about," she answered, with a cold little
laugh. "It is she who is showing me around. It is her tour. I am the
chaperone." Thorpe dwelt upon the word in his mind. He understood what
it meant only in a way, but he was luminously clear as to the bitterness
of the tone in which it had been uttered.

"No--it didn't seem as if it were altogether--what I might call--YOUR
tour," he ventured. They had seen much of each other these past few
days, but it was still hard for him to make sure whether their freedom
of intercourse had been enlarged.

The slight shrug of the shoulders with which, in silence, she commented
upon his remark, embarrassed him. For a moment he said nothing. He went
on then with a renewed consciousness of risk.

"You mustn't be annoyed with me," he urged. "I've been travelling with
that dear little niece of mine and her brother, so long, that I've
got into a habit of watching to notice if the faces I see round me are
happy. And when they're not, then I have a kind of fatherly notion of
interfering, and seeing what's wrong."

She smiled faintly at this, but when he added, upon doubtful
inspiration--"By the way, speaking of fathers, I didn't know at Hadlow
that you were the daughter of one of my Directors"--this smile froze
upon the instant.

"The Dent du Midi is more impressive from the hotel, don't you think?"
she remarked, "than it is from here."

Upon consideration, he resolved to go forward. "I have taken a great
interest in General Kervick," he said, almost defiantly. "I am seeing to
it that he has a comfortable income--an income suitable to a gentleman
of his position--for the rest of his life."

"He will be very glad of it," she remarked.

"But I hoped that you would be glad of it too," he told her, bluntly. A
curious sense of reliance upon his superiority in years had come to him.
If he could make his air elderly and paternal enough, it seemed likely
that she would defer to it. "I'm talking to you as I would to my niece,
you know," he added, plausibly.

She turned her head to make a fleeting survey of his face, as if the
point of view took her by surprise. "I don't understand," she said. "You
are providing an income for my father, because you wish to speak to me
like an uncle. Is that it?"

He laughed, somewhat disconsolately. "No--that isn't it," he said, and
laughed again. "I couldn't tell, you kn