"But he never seemed to take much notice of you," I said.

She laughed. "You needn't be so unkind, Paul. What did I ever do for
you much more than snub you? We boys and girls; there is not so much
difference between us: we love our masters. Yet you must not think so
poorly of me. I was only a child to him then, but we were locked up in
Paris together during the entire siege. Have not you heard? He did take
a little notice of me there, Paul, I assure you."

Would it have been better, I wonder, had she followed the woman and not
the fool? It sounds an easy question to answer; but I am thinking of
years later, one winter's night at Tiefenkasten in the Julier Pass. I
was on my way from San Moritz to Chur. The sole passenger, I had just
climbed, half frozen, from the sledge, and was thawing myself before the
stove in the common room of the hotel when the waiter put a pencilled
note into my hand:

"Come up and see me. I am a prisoner in this damned hole till the
weather breaks. Hal."

I hardly recognised him at first. Only the poor ghost he seemed of the
Hal I had known as a boy. His long privations endured during the Paris
siege, added to the superhuman work he had there put upon himself, had
commenced the ruin of even his magnificent physique--a ruin the wild,
loose life he was now leading was soon to complete. It was a gloomy,
vaulted room that once had been a chapel, lighted dimly by a cheap,
evil-smelling lamp, heated to suffocation by one of those great
green-tiled German ovens now only to be met with in rare out-of-the-way
world corners. He was sitting propped up by pillows on the bed, placed
close to one of the high windows, his deep eyes flaring like two
gleaming caverns out of his drawn, haggard face.

"I saw you from the window," he explained. "It is the only excitement
I get, twice a day when the sledges come in. I broke down coming across
the Pass a fortnight ago, on my way from Davos. We were stuck in a drift
for eighteen hours; it nearly finished my last lung. And I haven't even
a book to read. By God! lad, I was glad to see your frosted face ten
minutes ago in the light of the lantern."

He grasped me with his long bony hand. "Sit down, and let me hear
my voice using again its mother tongue--you were always a good
listener--for the last eight years I have hardly spoken it. Can you
stand the room? The windows ought to be open, but what does it matter? I
may as well get accustomed to the heat before I d