. The sleigh which had brought him up from the
station was at the foot of the rise. May saw him from the veranda, and
coo-ooed a welcome. He stamped the snow from his boots and ran up the
steps of the veranda to meet her.

"This is a very pleasant surprise," she said, giving him both her hands
and looking at him approvingly. He had lost much of his pallor, and his
face was tanned and healthy, though a little fine drawn.

"It was rather a mad thing to do, wasn't it?" he confessed ruefully.

"You are such a confirmed bachelor, Jasper, that I believe you hate
doing anything outside your regular routine. Why did you come all the
way from Holland to the Haute Savoie?"

He had followed her into the warm and cozy sitting room, and was warming
his chilled fingers by the big log fire which burned on the hearth.

"Can you ask? I came to see you."

"And how are all the experiments going?"

She turned him to another topic in some hurry.

"There have been no experiments since last month; at least not the kind
of experiments you mean. The one in which I have been engaged has been
very successful."

"And what was that?" she asked curiously.

"I will tell you one of these days," he said.

He was staying at the Hotel des Alpes, and hoped to be a week in
Chamonix. They chatted about the weather, the early snow which had
covered the valley in a mantle of white, about the tantalizing behavior
of Mont Blanc, which had not been visible since May had arrived, of the
early avalanches, which awakened her with their thunder on the night of
her arrival, of the pleasant road to Argentieres, of the villages by the
Col de Balme, which are buried in snow, of the sparkling, ethereal green
of the great glacier--of everything save that which was nearest to their
thoughts and to their hearts.

Jasper broke the ice when he referred to Frank's visit to Geneva.

"How did you know?" she asked, suddenly grave.

"Somebody told me," he said casually.

"Jasper, were you ever at Montreux?" she asked, looking him straight in
the eye.

"I have been to Montreux, or rather to Caux," he said. "That is the
village on the mountain above, and one has to go through Montreux to
reach it. Why did you ask?"

A sudden chill had fallen upon her, which she did not shake off that day
or the next.

They made the usual excursions together, climbed up the wooded slopes
of the Butte, and on the third morning after his arrival stood together
in the clear dawn a