ck the blood to a face blanched by a deadly fear.

Karl was stocked with reminiscences of Stampa. "I remember the time
when people said Christian was the best man in the Bernina," he said.
"He would never go back to the Valais after his daughter died. It was
a strange thing that he should come to grief on a cowherd's track like
that over Corvatsch. But Etta's affair----"

"_Schweige!_" snarled Bower, straightening himself suddenly. His dark
eyes shot such a gleam of lambent fury at the porter that the man's
jaw fell. The words were frozen on his lips. He could not have been
stricken dumb more effectually had he come face to face with one of
the horrific sprites described in the folklore of the hills.

Helen was surprised. What had poor Karl done that he should be bidden
so fiercely to hold his tongue? Then she thought that Bower must have
recalled Stampa's history, and feared that perhaps the outspoken
peasant might enter into a piquant account of some village scandal. A
chambermaid in the hotel, questioned about Stampa, had told her that
the daughter he loved so greatly had committed suicide. Really, she
ought to be grateful to her companion for saving her from a passing
embarrassment. But she had the tact not to drop the subject too
quickly.

"If Barth and you agree that roping is unnecessary, of course I
haven't a word to say in the matter," she volunteered. "It was rather
absurd of me to mention it in the first instance."

"No, you were right. I have never seen Stampa; but his name is
familiar. It occurs in most Alpine records. Barth, fix the rope before
we go farther. The _fraeulein_ wishes it."

The rush of color induced by physical effort--effort of a tensity that
Helen was wholly unaware of--was ebbing now before a numbing terror
that had come to stay. His face was drawn and livid. His voice had the
metallic ring in it that the girl had detected once already that day.
Again she experienced a sense of bewilderment that he should regard a
trivial thing so seriously. She was not a child. The world of to-day
pulsated with far too many stories of tragic passion that she should
be shielded so determinedly from any hint of an episode that doubtless
wrung the heart's core of this quiet valley one day in August sixteen
years ago. In some slight degree Bower's paroxysm of anger was a
reflection on her own good taste, for she had unwittingly given rise
to it.

Nevertheless, she felt indebted to him. To extricate bo