re annoyed than startled. He felt a great
disinclination for speech and an increasing desire to sit down and keep
still; and he did not care to conduct a quarrel sitting down.

However, a growing inability to stand up decided him; he dragged out his
toboggan and sat on it.

The speaker appeared round a bend of the run. She had apparently been
standing in the path that overlooked a considerable portion of it.

She was not a young woman, and from her complexion and the hardness of
her thickly built figure she might have been made of wood.

She wore a short, strapped-in skirt, leather leggings, and a
fawn-colored sweater. Her eyes were a sharp, decided blue, and the rest
of her appearance matched the sweater.

Winn pulled himself together.

"I don't see, Madam," he remarked slowly, but with extreme
aggressiveness, "what the devil my actions have to do with you!"

"No," said the lady, grimly, "I don't suppose from the exhibition I've
just been watching, that you're in the habit of seeing farther than to
the end of your own nose. However, I may as well point out to you that
if you had killed yourself, as you richly deserved, and as you came
within an ace of doing, the run would have been stopped for the season.
We should all have been deprived of the Grand National, and I, who come
up here solely to ride the Cresta, which I have done regularly every
winter for twenty years, would have had my favorite occupation snatched
from me at an age when I could least afford to miss it."

"I haven't been killed, and I had not the slightest intention of being
so," Winn informed her with dangerous calm. "I merely wished to ride the
Cresta for the first time unobserved. Apparently I have failed in my
intention. If so, it is my misfortune and not my fault." He took out a
cigarette, and lit it with a steady hand, and turned his eyes away from
her. He expected her to go away, but, to his surprise, she spoke again.

"My name," she said, "is Marley. What is yours?"

"Staines," Winn replied with even greater brevity. He had to give her
his name, but he meant it to be his last concession.

"Ah," she said thoughtfully, "that accounts for it. You're the image of
Sir Peter, and you seem to have inherited not only his features, but his
manners. I needn't, perhaps, inform you that the latter were uniformly
bad. I knew your father when I was a girl. He was stationed in Hong-Kong
at the time and he was good enough to call me the little Chines