manner of asking
questions; as Professor of the College of France, he was well pleased to
owe his life to an intelligent man.

As they traversed a pine-forest, they heard a voice hailing them,
and they were shortly joined by a guide whom Mlle. Moriaz, mortally
disquieted at the prolonged absence of her father, had sent in quest of
him. Pale with emotion, trembling in every fibre, she had seated herself
on the bank of a stream. She was completely a prey to terror, and in her
imagination plainly saw her father lying half dead at the bottom of some
precipice or rocky crevasse. On perceiving him she uttered a cry of joy
and ran to meet him.

"Ah! truly, my love," said he, "I have been more fortunate than wise.
And I shall have to ask my deliverer his name in order to present him to
you."

Count Abel appeared not to have heard these last words. He stammered
out something about M. Moriaz having exaggerated the worth of the little
service it had been his good fortune to render him, and then with a
cold, formal, dignified air, he bowed to Antoinette and moved hurriedly
away, as a man who cares little to make new acquaintances, and who longs
to get back to his solitude.

He was already at some distance when M. Moriaz, who had been busily
recounting his adventures to his daughter, bethought him that he had
kept his deliverer's overcoat. He searched in the pockets, and there
found a memorandum-book and some visiting-cards bearing the name of
Count Abel Larinski. Before dinner he made the tour of all the hotels in
Saint Moritz without discovering where M. Larinski lodged. He learned
it in the evening from a peasant who came over from Cellarina for the
overcoat.

The good Mlle. Moiseney was quite taken with Count Abel; first, because
he was handsome, and then because he played the piano bewitchingly.
There could be no doubt that Antoinette would feel grateful to this
good-looking musician who had restored to her her father. Certain
of being no longer thwarted in her enthusiasm, she said to her that
evening, with a smile which was meant to be excessively ironical:

"Well, my dear, do you still think that Count Larinski has a stoop in
his shoulders, and that his head is badly poised?"

"It is a matter of small import, but I do not gainsay it."

"Ah, if you had only heard him play one of Schumann's romances!"

"A talent for music is a noble one. Nevertheless, the man's chief merit,
in my eyes, is that he has a taste for sav