o interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or
oilcloth.

He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made
him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well
enough to know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a
matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed
to him that Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be
needed, and he was anywhere.

The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
and started up--first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in "tams" and
sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.

He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned
in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it,
coming toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his
hand on the door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.

It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it.
Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he
saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried
toward him.

Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
even not yet dead--that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
and suffer!

Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was
this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window
and clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of
their quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched
him through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!

Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
mountain roads, seld